A String of Pearls
by Missie2
Summary: Every pearl has a story. Not all of them are told.
1. Chapter 1

**A String of Pearls**

Not the proper sequel to Stolen, I'm developing that, but very much takes place in the same universe and is a lead into it.

...

 _ **The Shop Model**_

 _Wear and tear is to be expected._

Every cycle is largely the same, but at least it's not boring. Not really. From the window, the pearl can see the walkways and transit lines and the many, many different gems that pass the shop. It's fascinating how different they can be.

If she was capable of forming an opinion, her favourite would be the Sapphires in their little clutches, peacefully floating in neat rows without sparing a glance to the left or right, moving with distinguised purpose. They are pleasant to watch, even if they never look at her standing in the window. Sapphires are not permitted to own pearls, nothing of personal value is allowed in the cloisters.

Her least favourite, if she could express it, would be the Amethysts. They are loud and crude, and every pearl is aware of what happens to pearls that find their way into the barracks. Every look to the shop window is accompanied by a gale of lasvicious laughter. The pearl is obliged to smile at them regardless, even though they could never afford her.

 _Wear and tear is to be expected._

She does her job well. Every now and then a gem will stride with purpose into the shop, or will stop to gaze at her for a moment before deciding that they _would_ like their own pearl. The pearls in her string are purchased and taken away one by one, and she remains in the window, beckoning the customers.

 _Wear and tear is to be expected._

Deciding customers will poke and prod at her to assess what they're getting. There's never any damage to her gem, of course, but a lifetime of idleness is not good for one's mass. Every gem needs to regenerate from time to time, but as the shop model her job is clear. She must be in the window at all times. So her outfit, carefully chosen by the shop owner, becomes grubby and worn, and dust gathers around her gem setting, and her mind ticks over with what would have been boredom in any other gem.

 _Wear and tear is to be expected._

The new models come out, and the remaining pearls of her string are sold at a considerably lower price to clear stock. The shop model, however, is too outmoded and slow to be sold even at half price, and is classified as liquidated stock. She is one of the very few pearls that lives and dies without being owned by anyone.

...

 _ **The Twins**_

Almandine is the foremost designer of apparel, it makes sense that she's cutting edge. Even so, owning two pearls is extravagent, even for her. The fact that she doesn't use them for anything makes headlines; is it some sort of artistic statement?

The pearls are pink and blue-hued respectively, other than that they're identical. Almandine dresses the pink-hued in diaphanous blue and the blue-hued in pink ruffles, and sits them on a plinth across from each other at just the right angle to catch the light coming through her multi-plated windows. They do not speak, or hold anything, or perform any task other than sitting perfectly still. It's confusing even to people who know Almandine's pretentious nature, why would anyone buy even a single pearl just to have it do nothing?

She does throw spectacular parties though, and gems flock to her side just to experience a taste of her hedonism. It's during one of these parties that a Fluorite, on leave from an extended military campaign and out of her mind on gallium smoke, draws her weapon to show off to a flirty young Larimar and cracks it towards the blue-hued pearl. The pearl's gem snaps in two.

It's a huge hassle, of course, and Almandine is furious. She thrives on symmetry and her whole vision is knocked off balance. Thankfully she has insurance, but it's annoying all the same.

But after a rest cycle, she rises to find that the pink-hued pearl has developed an identical crack across her gem, though all of the guests have long since gone and she hasn't moved. They don't ever move.

Both pearls broken and now completely useless, she packs them away to be processed and applies for two new models.

...

 _ **The Contraband**_

There are many ways to filter pearls through the black market. It's risky, but for low-caste gems it's a way to make a lot of money in a very short amount of time. It simply requires a small gang of desperate gems who all want the same thing.

Grabbing the pearls off the street is the first issue. It takes a sharp eye to spot the more careless owners, the ones more likely to leave their pearls outside while they shop or have them trailing behind on walkways. This is the most dangerous part of the job, get caught and it's at least four hundred cycles in stasis. Jades are good at this, they are small and light-footed and usually somewhat foolhardy. Spinels are good too, not as quick as Jades but quick enough. Once the pearl is zoned in on and poofed, they can whisk it away to be wiped.

Sodalites, in the absence of a Peridot willing to work illegally, wipe the pearl's memory bank and carefully file away serial numbers. This is precise work, press too hard with the sander and the pearl could crack. Wipe the bank incorrectly and the pearl could be picked up on the communication lines and traced. Newer models have low-level tracers that need to be removed, pulled out a millimetre at a time. If it snaps midway through removal it could explode. It is dangerous, but Sodalites are meticulous.

With the pearl newly blanked, it can be sold. Underground auctions are the preferred way but these are subject to raids by the authorities. When an auction is shut down, even with no arrests made, all the obtained pearls have to be purged. It's a terrible waste.

The pearls are often kept unformed in barrels of silica or stored in the muzzles of rotor guns, commonly sold items. There are code words and contacts; It's said that anyone who wants to buy a black market pearl needs to find a Zoicite and ask the right question.

For gems that really like to live dangerously, there's always a chance that a higher-caste gem has stored some information on their pearl that would ruin them if it got out. Military secrets, or evidence that they've been stealing, or romantic scandals, anything they would pay to keep hidden. Some gems have made a lot of money this way. Some of these same gems have disappeared without a trace.

...

 _ **Patient Zero**_

It's a shame that it has to be a black market pearl. But how else would a common Sodalite be able to get one? It's black market or nothing.

The operation confirms her suspicions, and although it's by no means simple she has high hopes that this will be the beginning of something grand, or at the very least it will ease her conscience.

 _No. It will never ease. It's not supposed to._

The pearl makes it through the surgery and regenerates, looking no worse for wear. She blinks, twice, and then it becomes apparent that something is wrong. Her breathing is frenzied, she cowers away from any attempt to touch her, she doesn't say a word but utters a low, keening wail. They have no choice but to allow her to curl up in a corner rocking back and forth, otherwise she'll make so much noise it won't escape detection.

After a while, they come to terms with the fact that they can't let her carry on in such misery, and she is mercifully terminated.

A second pearl is acquired and operated on. This one does not react the same way upon regeneration, but it's just as bad. She sobs quietly to herself, can't speak for tears, hides under a blanket. She too is terminated, and going to her doom is the only time they see her smile.

The third pearl doesn't wait to be terminated; within moments of regenerating, she smashes her own gem with a chisel.

The fourth pearl is restrained upon regenerating, as the last incident has left them rattled, and she does nothing but scream and beg them to kill her. They do it.

It's the fact that they're black market pearls that's causing the trouble, Sapphire advises, and Sodalite has to agree. If she was a black market pearl in possession of her full senses, she'd want to be dead too. But unless they go out and steal a high-caste gem's pearl, they have no choice but to rely on the black market.

Thirty-eight terminated pearls later, Sapphire comes to Sodalite with interesting news.

"A Diamond has been asking questions," she told her. "About the pearls."

"And?" Sodalite responds wearily. She's terminated a pearl not that long ago, and the screams are still ringing in her ears.

"I see that this is what we're looking for. I think you need to talk to her."

Sodalite snorts. Sapphire sees a lot, and she trusts in her vision, but she has her own agenda to push.

"Why do I need to talk to her?" she asks.

"She has a pearl. A new one."

Sodalite sits up, suddenly clear-headed.

"All right then, arrange a meeting."


	2. Chapter 2

A String of Pearls

Chapter Two

...

 **Superior**

Nobody who sees her now could deny that she's done well for herself. Her fellow Larimars are all working in shops or as merchant secretaries, filing reports and filling their days with piecemeal rubbish and petty pleasures. Her days, by comparison, are an endless glittering parade of exciting parties, luxury goods and mixing with the superstars of the gem world.

And it's not like Emerald is difficult to please in return for providing her with this lifestyle. All Emerald wants is some doting company, and Larimar is perfectly willing to provide that. Even if Emerald's stories are long-winded and she's told them all before, even if she doesn't always want to go to the parties, even if she has hands that wander tediously when Larimar has much better things to do, it's a good relationship to be in for both of them.

Larimar is so good to Emerald, why would Emerald deny her something she desperately wants? And the new pearl series are so pretty, and so useful, and there's only so many that get made...

Sure, they're expensive, but they're the best. Doesn't Larimar deserve the best?

When she finally talks Emerald around, she deliberates for a long time about the kind of pearl she wants. It's an important decision, this pearl will be with her for a long time and it has to look good next to her. She settles on a pale blue-hued pearl (like Almandine's!) with pale pink, almost white, curls to compliment her own white skin and long blue curls.

She takes her time choosing outfits for her new pearl. Some gems match outfits with theirs, an extravagent dress for themselves and a smaller muted version for the pearl, but that's pretty tacky in Larimar's view. Instead she matches the smaller details; if she wears smooth lilac robes, her pearl wears a plain white shift with a lilac sash. The effect is much more flattering.

Over time, though, she becomes disillusioned with pearl ownership. She is snappy with the pearl, gives it orders it finds difficult to perform, picks at its appearance, strikes at it in frustration. Subconciously she knows it's not the pearl's fault, it does what it's told to do and does it perfectly.

Perfectly.

That's the heart of the problem. The pearl is perfect, and technically speaking although it belongs to Larimar, Emerald is the one who paid for it, and it takes orders from her too. And Emerald can't help but ask it to do the things Larimar is reluctant to do. The pearl does anything Emerald wants it to do, and doesn't ask for rewards or to be taken out or even for a passing compliment to be thrown in its direction.

She coasts by, though her confidence is shaken. The pearl isn't as responsive as she is, or as fun to be around, and can't make conversation. That makes Larimar more valuable (though Emerald has never wanted fun or conversation, just someone to take care of her.) And she's more beautiful too. It was her beauty that caught Emerald's eye in the first place, and the pearl is so dull and plain next to Larimar's sparkling personage.

(But is that really true? She chose the pearl for its beauty, to compliment her own, and its face is lovely in its placidness as Larimar's anger and jealousy write themselves in her expression.)

Larimar cannot sing, and though she does dance from time to time its a loose affair powered by gallium smoke and pounding music. She has never been known for her cleverness, or kindness. All she really has is her beauty, and if she is outmatched on that she has nothing.

When she insists that she needs to shop for new apparel for both herself and the pearl, Emerald thinks nothing of it, gives her a handful of credit notes and sends them both off in a hired luger. Larimar directs the luger to one of the lower class districts and they walk around for half a cycle, before the inevitable happens. There's a small noise from behind her, and when she looks the pearl is gone.

When she returns home, she acts distraught at the loss, and when Emerald suggests that they use the insurance to buy a new one, she refuses.

"I don't think I could own another pearl. It'd just upset me," she says.

 **Get thee to a nunnery**

Collectively, the Sapphires have seen hundreds of battles, many awful political skirmishes, traitors and terrorists and everything in between. The visions they dredge up can range from utterly benign to horrifying. With this in mind, it's almost funny how flustered they became at the unexpected presence of a pearl in the cloisters.

"It won't be here for long," Sapphire Cet assures them, though she has not meditated and does not know that for sure.

Topaz had stopped by to ask for advice on an upcoming political campaign and had brought a newly-acquired pearl with her. Obviously it had been very newly acquired, because she wasn't used to its presence and had left without it. For two cycles, it sat in the visiting chambers waiting for its owner to come back for it while the Sapphires avoided it and fretted about what to do.

"It's not supposed to be here," Sapphire Mol whispers, as though afraid the pearl will hear her and get angry. "These chambers are for Sapphires, no other gems!"

"It's fine, pearls aren't real gems," Sapphire Byn replies. "It doesn't count. Our visions won't be affected."

They carry on, circuit chants in between pod resting and occasional trips outside to network with other cloisters on collective visions. Sapphire Byn appeared to be right, their visions are largely as accurate as those of the other cloisters.

After six cycles, they have to move the pearl from the visitor chamber as they are awaiting a conference with a leading Flourite. This makes them all very nervous; how will a non-Sapphire presence in the sacred cloisters affect their chants? The pearl doesn't object to being moved; it does as it's told.

Ten cycles on, the pearl has had no affect whatsover on their lives and they all relax. It sits in a corner watching them blankly as they perform their chants and quietly discuss their visions with each other.

Twelve cycles on, Sapphire Kiv is the one who makes a move towards the pearl. It would be Sapphire Kiv; she's young for a Sapphire, prone to restlessness and frequently chastised for insubordination. She's spent more time in iso-pod than any other Sapphire in the district. Perhaps this is why she wants to talk to the pearl, as it's gone twelve cycles without really speaking to any of them.

"Are you allowed to speak to us?" she asks to begin.

The pearl nods.

"My owner has not claimed me after one cycle set, I am now property of the state," it responds.

Technically, that means they should be calling in the Amethyst impound personnel, but Sapphire Kiv decides not to let the others know this. They will never be permitted to own a pearl, this is the closest they will ever get.

"Can you sing?" Sapphire Kiv asks.

"Of course," the pearl replies.

When it sings, it is unlike anything the Sapphires have ever heard before. They sing all the time, but their chants are deep, sonorous, designed to pull the energy from around them to resonate through their being and bring the visions forward. The pearl's song is a simple one, a little melody about the dance of the stars and the passage of time sung to very young gems in their rest pods, but its voice is clear and melodious and beautifully lilting. The Sapphires forget their trepidation and stop where they are to listen, mesmerized.

Over the next cycles, though they continue with their circuit chants as scheduled and their rest periods, they often ask the pearl to sing, or to tell a story. There is the creeping sense that it will start to affect the purity of their visions, but they force it down to indulge in this little frivolity.

The pearl is a masterful storyteller, what it lacks in emotion it makes up for in the way it uses holograms to illustrate a tale. It knows so many legends that even the oldest Sapphire is taken aback (and secretly thrilled) and when it tells stories of star-crossed lovers, the Sapphires sigh almost in unison, each wondering what it would be like to be so loved.

But all good things end, and after forty cycles the pearl is finally taken away to be impounded and processed. The Sapphires go back to life as normal, though they feel the absence of the pearl almost like a wound.

Sapphire Kiv feels the absence of the pearl the hardest. It's not the pearl as such, but the frustration of the routine, the feeling of being trapped. It was hard before the pearl, with the pearl gone it's almost unbearable.

Ten cycles after the pearl has gone, Sapphire Kiv puts on her cowl to journey outside of the cloister with her clutch. She neglects to secure it, so that her vision to the right and left is no longer obscured all the way.

Midway through the town, a disturbance is going down. A group of gems are clashing with Amethysts over something, and although the Sapphires are nervous they skirt around the area without any trouble. Curious, Sapphire Kiv glances to her right.

Caught midway after throwing an old sulfur bottle at the barricade, a Ruby turns and looks to her left. Her two eyes, black and glittering like stars, meet Sapphire's single blue eye and the two of them are struck still in the middle of the street. There is a pull like something physical, and Sapphire feels her manifested heart thrum loudly throughout her whole being. It feels like she could melt on the spot. It's unpleasant. She doesn't want it to end.

The spell is broken when an Amethyst thumps the Ruby over the head and drags her away, and Sapphire is pulled away by a furious Sapphire Byn.

Three cycles later, she is given the opportunity to escape, and she takes it.

...

 **Careless**

It's a pretty good joke, absurd and inexplicable. Beryl, who is for the most part a wonderfully stern presence and a decorated military official, is unbelievably careless with her stuff. Especially the pearls.

She was given her first pearl as part of a service package to thank her for her input in a recent skirmish that would have gone very badly without her help. It was one of the first ever created too, making it invaluable on the collector's market.

So of course she ruined it by asking it to run frequencies through the mainframe, frying its gem and shattering it beyond repair. And of course, she hadn't thought to get insurance.

Her second pearl had the distinction of being the one she kept for the longest. It worked with a badly damaged gem for a long time before it finally curled up under a table and quietly died. This time Beryl was insured.

The third pearl was stolen on the street.

The fourth was left behind on a public tracer and didn't turn up in the impound lot.

The fifth was also left on the tracer, and it did turn up in the impound lot, but as Beryl had lost the paperwork she couldn't prove it was hers.

The sixth was stolen on the street.

As was the seventh. It was subsequently found and purged, as they had concerns it harboured military secrets in its memory bank.

The eighth was dropped from a balcony at a party.

The ninth was taken during a burglary, found and purged.

The tenth took a hard blow from Beryl's summoned weapon when a holo-message it was projecting made her angry and she reacted in a fit of temper.

The eleventh was left on the tracer. Beryl didn't bother checking the impound lot.

The twelvth died, for but the repair personnel couldn't explain why.

The thirteenth was soaked in liquid thallium and dissolved.

The fourteenth was stolen, never found and probably still out there somewhere.

When Beryl recieves her fifteenth pearl, it's given with a wink and a chuckle from her friends. They have bets running on whether or not she can keep this one for longer than a hundred cycles. It's all very funny.

 _To a pearl, it is nothing even close to a joke. Pearls, organic as they are, leave minute traces of themselves everywhere they go. A new pearl can feel the presence of the pearls that have gone before them. Beryl's home is haunted by the pearls she has lost. It's like walking into a room full of corpses._


	3. Chapter 3

**A String of Pearls**

Turns out having a really godawful week is good fuel for writing this particular series, but if you'd like me to feel more motivated so I can provide more content, please consider reviewing or reblogging, it really gives me a boost and I desperately need it right now.

...

 _ **Pointing**_

Like all things that are the preserve of the young and idle, 'pointing' is ironically pointless. When the first crop of images start making the rounds, older gems roll their eyes and brace themselves for an onslaught of mass media stupidity.

Simply put, the composition for a 'pointing' image is for a pearl to be balancing on something ludicrous, like the rim of a tapered glass or the rail of a balcony, and its owner (and in some cases, friends of the owner) standing around it pointing to it with exaggerated incredulity. It's a double pun, the pearl is usually balanced on the tip of its toes in pointe formation and the gems that own it are pointing to it to establish the astonishing feat. It is, in a word, trite.

Because everyone knows that a pearl's manifested mass is spindly and not very heavy, and that their balance is impeccable. Showing it off in such a crude manner is just boasting about owning a pearl with a dash of crude humour thrown in. After all, most of the pearls that show up in 'pointing' images are the newest on the market.

Before the fad wears off, and before Almandine brings it back briefly as an ironic statement about gem youth culture, 'pointing' has made its mark. There are laws made forbidding pearls to be more than three pelmetres from their owners after one owner ordered her pearl to balance on the wires of an incoming tracer. The pearl was promptly fried, the tracer was down for the day, and the owner was billed over half of her lifespan earnings.

Likewise, dangling a pearl from a balcony, roof or window can earn an owner up to three hundred cycles in iso-pod after one pearl was pushed from a rail and landed on a Topaz, severely damaging the Topaz' gem and smashing the pearl outright. A pearl's balance may be perfect, but young gems are often fickle and sometimes malicious, and they can't always be trusted to behave responsibly with their belongings.

...

 _ **Haunted**_

For Tourmaline, it's not even something to be considered. Money is money, after all, and she's got nerves of steel. When anyone brings up how much it freaks them out, she laughs it off and says it doesn't bother her in the slightest.

 _It does bother her, of course it does._

She had a case made for the pearl, perspex with a shiny blue background and a small plinth for the pearl to sit on. It's still wearing the original outfit, a pale yellow full-skirted dress that reaches its ankles, a ribbon around its throat and a matching one in its short blue hair. It is leaning slightly to one side, hands folded neatly on its lap, eyes half-shut. Sometimes.

Gems will pay to see it and watch it for a long time, waiting for it to move. It never does while they're watching, but it does move. Tourmaline tells them the perspex is sealed shut, and demonstrates by summoning her switch and lashing at the case. When it bounces off harmlessly, the crowd knows she has no hand in moving the pearl and the mystery deepens. Images hung around the room show that it has moved to lean to the other side, or it has opened its eyes fully, or it has clenched its fists.

For all intensive purposes, the pearl is dead. Its mass is non-functioning, its gem is cracked and ruined and it is incapable of following even the most basic command. It should have been processed, but the fact that it sometimes moved after death scared the old owner half into her gem and she couldn't bear to keep it in her residence any longer. It did the rounds on the black market for a bit and spooked a number of owners before Tourmaline found a use for it.

From time to time, she hears a shriek in the viewing room that means the pearl has moved when the gem viewing it wasn't looking, and its usually followed by them fleeing and a following upsurge in business for a few cycles afterwards. It's a comfortable way to make a living to be sure.

After she's shut up business for rest cycle, she often sees the pearl looking straight at her. No matter what position its been in for viewing, it always ends by looking at her. Tourmaline meets its gaze for as long as she can, which is never very long.

The pearl is dead. It's not really looking at her.

 _The pearl is not dead. Its spike suffered a malfunction after being driven further into its foundation layer and instead of shocks spaced by periods of clarity, it gets constant shocks. It is unable to function in this state except for random occasional involuntary flickers of movement. When it can manage to move deliberately, it tries to communicate that it wishes to be processed._

...

 _ **Reward**_

They are excellent Jaspers, they are told. The cream of the crop. Loyal, unwavering, brave and disciplined. They make Homeworld proud.

For all that they are young and green, and have only been on the battlefield a scant few times, they hold their pride above all things. They are good to each other, a working Jasper battalion thrives on co-operation and teamwork. At the same time, they are well-behaved enough to be trusted on solo missions.

The reward is unexpected, and glorious. When they first got word of it, they worked themselves up into a frenzy wondering what it could possibly be. Personal belongings are meagre in the barracks, and there's seventy of them. What could they be given? Flourite drops the box off with them and gives them a wink, tells them to be nice and share.

At first they barely know what to do with her. She's so _small, dainty_ even. And she looks brand-new, though for a pearl to end up in the barracks she couldn't possibly be anything but a stolen black-market one. She is dressed simply, just a long white shirt and knee-skimming blue leggings, yellow curls trimmed to shoulder length. Her smile is bright, unafraid. She is out of place, the Jaspers who muster up the courage to touch her wince at how huge and clumsy their hands look next to her slender frame.

And yet...

She becomes a fixture, something they all need. They share her graciously, there's a rota for whose rest pod she slips into every rest cycle. What the Jasper in the rest pod does with her is her business and nobody asks questions, but it is understood that no harm should come to her as she doesn't belong to just one, but all of them.

Jasper 1501 feels each stretch between the pearl leaving to service the others and coming around like a hunger. Some Jaspers swap their turns for favours or to get out of punishments, but Jasper 1501 doesn't and couldn't imagine giving away her turn for anything. She _needs_ her turn.

They engage in coitus, naturally. But more importantly, the pearl cradles Jasper 1501's head in her flimsy little arms and sings to her. Because sometimes Jasper 1501 feels scared of what may happen to her on the battlefield, she's seen so many gems fallen and smashed, and her own life is a small thing in the grand scheme but it's all she has. If she falls, she will be replaced and unmourned. But she does like to think that the pearl would miss singing to her, and that's something.

After a successful skirmish on a waterlogged planet, a group of older Jaspers are sent to their barracks temporarily while their barracks are being repaired. Annoyed but also eager to impress these more experienced colleagues, they attempt to fit them in the pearl schedule.

The older Jaspers scoff. What's the point in waiting around? That's not what pearls are for.

They bring her out there and then, and nobody stops them. When they put the pearl on the table and suggest that they see how many rounds she can go before she cracks, nobody stops them. Jasper 1501 thinks she sees the pearl's smile waver a little, but it could be a trick of the light. With so many Jaspers filling the room, it's hard to tell.

 _The answer is forty-eight._

Within four cycles, the older Jaspers are gone and things go back to normal, but not really. There's a sullen anger in the barracks, a sense of mistrust that hadn't been there before. The feeling that the older Jaspers had duped them and disappointment that they had fallen for it.

When it's Jasper 1501's turn again, the pearl smiles as she always has, but there's something off about it. It's not the same smile as before. And when she tries to sing, it's discordant and off-key, there's no comfort in it at all.


	4. Chapter 4

**A String of Pearls**

 **Chapter Four**

Last week I opened up a prompt submission for my Tumblr followers to give me a quote, a word or a subject to write three sentences about for a drabble. I need a few more to fill my quota, so I'm going to open it up here as well. Comment below if you'd like to add to the drabble, and you can submit more than one.

I prepared for this chapter by watching a few Jane Campion films. I wonder if it shows.

…..

 _ **Soul**_

The pearl is a retirement gift. As far as Lapis Lazuli is concerned, it's an insult.

She shoves it into the corner until she can figure out what to do with it. Selling it would just be hassle she doesn't need, she has more than enough money and it's an older pearl model too. They wouldn't even spring for a brand new one.

After a time, she gives it odd jobs to do around her home, just to keep it busy. The way it sits staring at nothing is unnerving. One day it goes to brush some dust from the surface keys of the symphonaria and Lapis looses the run of herself, grabs its arm and wrenches it away so hard it falls over.

"You don't touch that," she snarls, though to what end she doesn't know. The pearl doesn't feel fear, it nods and goes back to work.

She takes care of the symphonaria herself, rubs liniment on the strings and washes distilled water through the pipes, relishing the little rise in spirit she feels when she tests them to find the instrument in perfect tune.

Her gem is no longer smooth as it had been, and her playing has lost much of what made it special, but the symphonaria is hers and will be her companion as her retirement stretches before her.

She agrees to tutor some young Lapis at her home, not because she needs the money but because it's a shame for her magnificent instrument to sit without being played. She can no longer play it herself, the deep crack in her gem grows every cycle and though she has been patched, it cannot replace what was lost. Her fingers do not sync with the symphonaria as they once had. They don't move they way she wants them to.

The first Lapis is a callow, clumsy little oaf with no real interest, and after three lessons Lapis tells her not to return. The second is good, has nimble fingers and a keen memory but is impatient and hammers the strings far too hard. Lapis tells her not to return too.

The third and fourth are in awe of her legacy, and it makes them forget to lose themselves fully in the music. They don't even make it past the first lesson.

"None of them are a match," she mutters, fixing the strings where the last Lapis had knocked them askew. "Give them the notes and they'll put them in order, but there's no _soul_ in their playing!"

The only other gem in the room is the pearl, who could be listening or not. It doesn't matter.

Time marches on, and her visitors decrease with every cycle. She can't blame them, when she played she was happy, and now that she cannot she is bitter. Increasingly she brings up old holo-casts of when she was young and the music she made had no equal. Sometimes she asks the pearl to watch with her, so she has someone to talk at. At least it never talks back.

"Look at the flow," she tells it, zooming in on the spread of her fingers across the strings. "Fast, but smooth, like water."

"Yes, it's beautiful," the pearl tells her, and she's startled because she's never heard it talk before.

She has moments, shameful awful moments, where she sits at the symphonaria and tries to recall her music and can't. How could she not, the music was so much a part of her that it's a half-life without it. She screams and cries and tries to pull out the strings that won't answer to her but only hurts herself in the process, while the pearl waits until she has exhausted herself and silently takes her to her rest pod.

A strange notion occurs to her, after one of these moments. She tells the pearl to sit at the symphonaria and play something.

"You can't be any worse than those Lapis they brought up here," she says casually.

The pearl doesn't object (why would it?) and takes up a position that makes Lapis sit up because it's eerily familiar. It's not a beginner's posture.

What flows out of its fingers is a song she's long tried to recapture, one that has escaped her newly-awkward hands. It speaks of love, longing, euphoria. It's a difficult song, it dips and swirls and picks up with two conflicting melodies at once. It is not a song one can play without _soul._ Without soul, it is incomplete.

For the first time, she sees the pearl properly. Its face doesn't look any different, but there's a spark there, something in its stance ( _her stance)._ She has never touched the symphonaria before. She has learned this from watching Lapis' old holo-casts and took it for herself.

When the song is finished, she remains seated, awaiting Lapis' next command.

But she cannot bring herself to make a command. Now that she _knows._

What now?

…..

 _ **Company**_

Of course she knows the jokes. She's not afraid of the jokes. Not really.

It's an old pearl she ends up with, a shop display model she got for a bargain price. Its gem is faded and its mass is discoloured slightly, but they don't make ugly pearls and this one is beautiful regardless.

Chalcedony's quarters are not built for a pearl's long limbs, and it's hard to find a place for it. Her bulky rest pod takes up half of the room, and the commu-console the entire far wall to be accessible at all times. She makes up a little corner for it, with a cushion on the floor and a space on the wall for its charge pad. It looks happy enough there, she thinks, and then she shakes that thought from her head because that kind of thinking is what lead the others into trouble.

Even now, checking the commu-links, she sees posts from Chalcedonies that talk about their pearls as though they were actual gems that chose to be there. As if they hadn't bought them from a shop or traded on the black market for one.

 _As if any freely-thinking gem would choose to live with a Chalcedony._

She is a realist, or at least she likes to think so, and she is aware that she is not an attractive gem. Her mass is disproportionate, her gem is an awkward shape and she's not much bigger than a silica barrel. The shining example of gem beauty is Pink Diamond and she's so far removed from that paragon that they might as well be two different life-forms.

Even if she was beautiful, she hasn't much to offer a partner. All she does is work, and work is done where she lives, and there's hardly a need to go outside. Other gems tend to stare when they see a Chalcedony outside, though it's not like they're forbidden like the Sapphires are, or even restricted like the Rubies.

So really it's no wonder some of the others have become so attached to their pearls. Pearls don't judge, and you can keep them anywhere and they won't complain. Chalcedony hardly goes outside so she doesn't have to worry about it being stolen either.

She won't get attached, she knows that much. She's a sensible gem. She just wants an extra pair of hands to help with the switchboard from time to time, and something to answer back when she gets bored, and maybe something to play with in her rest pod if she gets the urge. She won't get attached.

 _Except..._

A mere three cycles after buying the pearl, she finds herself talking out loud a lot more.

Three cycles after that, she's taking breaks from her work to sit and flip through catalogues with the pearl, asking its _opinion,_ as if it had one.

She reads out a story from the message board and the pearl laughs without being ordered. Chalcedony puts it down to a glitch.

The pearl gets this odd look in its eyes whenever Chalcedony turns around in her chair. It perks up, almost.

Little non-sensible thoughts worm their way into her mind. She buys new apparel to replace the shop-scuffed dress. A bigger cushion for the pearl's corner.

Thinks _she,_ not _it._

It's a slippery slope then, and she practically throws herself down it. Notices all the little quirks and movements she hadn't seen before, and looks for small things she imagines might make the pearl happy, stories and pictures she's collected from the holo-casts. She talks about what her pearl does on message boards, what they do together.

She still considers herself a sensible gem. What could be more sensible than enjoying some company?

But then the crisis hits, and with repairs to her console and mainframe she has almost no money left to live on. It's not just her, many Chalcedonies are in the same situation.

She sells the pearl for half the price she paid, and is bitter about it, but that's the best she can get and she needs the money. Other Chalcedonies have sold their rest pods and kept their pearls, and they will regret that. It's foolish.

A pearl is, after all, just a pearl and anything she saw beyond that was probably just lonliness. She thought it looked sad when it was lead away, but that's not possible. It was all in her head.

…..

 _ **Communal**_

It could be worse. She'd thought she was destined for the barracks. She had given away many memories in preparation.

Instead, five Peridots had pooled their money and picked her out of a line-up because...

" _That one's green! We like green, right?"_

She was hustled back to their quarters, a set of small adjoining rooms with rest pods set into the floor for efficiency. They left her sitting in the rest pod as they made out a very specific, very thorough schedule for which one got to keep her in their room on different cycles. Then they squabbled for nearly half a cycle on who got to take her first.

Their arguments (and she witnessed them _very_ often) were shrill, full of out-of-context insults and usually over very quickly. Sometimes they collapsed into physical violence but never past the level of some jerky slapping and a few clumsy kicks. It truly felt like a good chunk of her existence was taken up by silently watching them fight over her.

Peridot 17-X wanted to stay in the rest pod with her during their cycle, but never asked her for anything beyond a cuddle. She liked the pearl to massage the setting around her gem for some reason, too. Afterwards she would brag about just how much sex they'd had and pearl would go along with the lie with a small nod.

Peridot 22-X used up the time on her production line coming up with new theories and ideas that she would furiously sketch on holo-screens for most of their cycle. She ran the math through pearl's inner processor and formed simulations with her holo-form. Then, having worn herself out, she would have pearl tuck her into her rest pod and leave her to tidy up the mess.

Peridot 24-X didn't speak much, but brought scraps from the assembly line to see what could be done with them. She asked pearl mostly to hold things in place while she soldered them together, or cut them into strips to weave into something. If the result was of no use but looked quite nice, she gave it to pearl to keep. Over time she amassed a collection.

Peridot 31-X liked music, though she wouldn't admit it to another Peridot, and she asked pearl to sing to her in the rest pod, as it was soundproof and nobody would hear. Sometimes she brought up a holo-screened concert and mimed playing the symphonaria though she knew she'd never get to touch one.

Peridot 35-X just wanted someone to talk to. She would talk for their entire cycle together, in the rest pod, voicing things she'd never say to another gem. Things about how much she hated the assembly line, things about the Diamond Authority that would be deemed traitorous. She talked about how scared she felt all the time, but she couldn't say what it was that she was scared of, and that just frightened her more.

Once, in preparation for a Diopside race, the Peridots invited a similar group of three Peridots over with their pearl so they could combine their holo-screens to get a better view of the casted race. As soon as the Peridots had chosen a place to view the race and gotten the pearls into position beside each other, they began to squabble.

"You can't use an ion spear, it'll crack her gem," Peridot 17-X snapped, knocking the spear out of the stranger Peridot's hand.

"You get a better signal this way, I've done it loads," the stranger Peridot growled.

"So then do it to your one, this is _our_ one," Peridot 22-X yelled and pushed her.

As they devolved into a scrappy bundle of shrieks and shoving, the pearls talked with their hands and eyes.

 _ **Are you doing well?**_

 _ **I am quite well. Are you well?**_

 _ **I believe I am. They are very good to me.**_

It was true. The **nothing** had little to scramble when it did hit, and every cycle was much the same with no awful surprises. What pearl could ask for more?


	5. Chapter 5

**A String of Pearls**

 **Chapter Five**

Possible I've hit my peak pretentious git: Latin chapter titles. Only for this one, I swears.

…..

 _ **Bis Pueri Senes**_

The start of the cycle was Carnelian rising from her rest pod and calling for her robe. The pearl would be waiting in the next room with the robe to rush to her mistresses' side. Carnelian did not like to be kept waiting.

"Thank you, my dear," she said, shrugging on the robe and indulging in a long, languid stretch. "What's today, then?"

"It's cycle number 143, ma'am."

"Oh, it is? Goodness, we have a lot to do!"

She hopped delicately out of the pod and shimmied into the living area, scanning it with a careful eye for detail. The pearl trailed after her.

"I suppose it's tidy enough, but we'll have to move some of the furniture around."

By 'we' she meant the pearl would have to move the furniture, while she watched and critiqued their positions. The pearl spent the first half of the cycle moving everything a little to the left, then a little to the right, until it was for some reason 'perfect.'

"Oh blast it, look at the time!" Carnelian exclaimed. "All this fussing over the furniture and nothing else is ready...do we have enough compound mix?"

"Yes ma'am," the pearl answered politely.

"What about oxides?"

"We have those too," the pearl answered pleasantly.

"Well, you must have been busy," Carnelian said with a soft smile. "Remind me to slip something extra into your pay packet this week. I don't know how I'd manage without you."

The pearl could have told Carnelian there and then that she didn't get paid, but she chose not to. Carnelian was already at her vanity dashboard, fussing with the pipes.

"Do something with my hair," she told the pearl. "Big but not too big."

The pearl teased her hair into a fluffy red-gold cloud and then tamped it down by wrapping it around itself in a single curled wave. While she was busy securing the style with stiffening lotion, Carnelian experimented with dabs of colour across her face.

"Well?" she asked, spinning her chair around. "How do I look?"

"Beautiful," the pearl told her. Carnelian laughed.

"I knew that already, but it's nice to hear," she sighed. "Come on then, our guests will be here soon. Oh, and change out of that. Blue is not the colour for today."

Carnelian took her place at the head of the table, while the pearl (now dressed in white) went into the entry hallway as ordered to wait on the door.

Three of the compound mixes and two oxides had been ingested by Carnelian when pearl decided it was okay to leave the door unattended. Nobody had arrived and nobody would. She hadn't had a visitor in over three orbits.

"They're quite late, aren't they?" Carnelian muttered, taking up another oxide as pearl sat across from her.

"Yes, ma'am. Perhaps they've been delayed by traffic."

"Mm," Carnelian hummed. "Well then, sit with me for a while. Let's have a little chat while we're waiting."

The 'chat' was mostly Carnelian talking about her past exploits; her days as a paramour, an entertainer, an ambassador in the Diamond Court. Her recall was impressive, considering how wide the crack in her gem was and how much wider it got with every cycle that passed. Pearl nodded and smiled politely, and even pretended to sip at the oxide (Carnelian would notice if she left it untouched.)

As the cycle drew to a close, Carnelian looked at the empty containers and frowned.

"Goodness, that must have been quite a party. Clean this up, will you?"

Pearl would clean up the used containers and store the unused while Carnelian wiped the colour from her face and changed into a comfortable outfit for resting. Pearl would make the adjustments on her holo-form later; Carnelian seemed unaware that her mass was shifting and out-of-proportion and still ordered everything in her old sizes.

The pearl came to check on her as she settled into the rest pod. Sometimes she would go quietly, but sometimes..."

"It's all gone," she whispered, pulling pearl close. "It was here before, but it's all gone."

"Maybe it will be back soon," pearl whispered back.

The next cycle began with Carnelian rising from her rest pod and calling for her robe.

"Thank you, my dear," she said. "What's today, then?"

"It's cycle number 144, ma'am."

"Oh, it is? Goodness, we have a lot to do!"

…..

 _ **Perfer et Obdura**_

It was well-known that Hematite did not let her pearl walk around unattended; she always had at least four Spinels or Jades to escort her. It was perhaps too well-known, so that when all six Spinels were cut down and the pearl grabbed and stuffed into a sack right off the street, only Hematite seemed surprised.

The pearl's captors did not damage her, and the sack was just to keep her still and stop her from seeing where the gang's safehouse was. She was taken out of the sack eventually but fixed to a chair with wire cabling and thoroughly inspected.

The gem inspecting her whistled low.

"I know Hematite's got serious cash but..."

"Yeah, well, don't touch it," another gem warned from where she was seated on a stack of crates. "You know what she said. Wait 'til she gets back."

"I'm just looking," the first gem said, worrying her lip with her teeth. "How much you reckon one of these costs, anyway?"

"Who knows? She probably stole it!"

"And now the boss has stolen it, so maybe we get to keep it."

While the two gems chattered away, pearl found the important files Hematite had stored on her and searched for a well inside herself to put them in. She stored them deep, underneath her shared memories, as deep as they could go.

The 'boss' arrived back at the safehouse near the end of the cycle, looked her over. She took out a long sharp object (it looked like a surge dagger but cruder, possibly home-made) and pressed it gently under pearl's eye.

"No need to worry, sweetheart," she said with a grin that was probably scary to any other gem. "We're not going to hurt you, as long as you and your boss do as we say. Understand?"

"I will comply to the best of my ability," the pearl answered, face unchanged.

The other gems laughed indulgently.

"Get Hematite on the line," the boss said, flinging up an old battered holo-screen and disappearing behind it. The connections beeped and screeched, and in a matter of moments pearl's owner was looking at her through the screen.

"Oh, for...cowards!" Hematite growled at the screen. "What do you want with my pearl?"

"We don't want the pearl," the boss called from offscreen. "We're happy to trade it back to you. Make us an offer."

"Fine," Hematite grumbled. "What do you want?"

"Precincts 16 and 17 are our turf. Off-limits, get it? Only we get to case that area!"

"No can do, that's cutting off my East trade routes," Hematite told them.

"I don't care about your trade routes, your gems were doing business on our turf."

"Okay, so I'll talk to them and it won't happen again," Hematite told them smoothly. "We keep the routes for trade only. I'll even overlook you taking my pearl as long as she comes back in one piece."

The boss choked out a scornful laugh.

"You really think it's gonna be that easy? This pearl must be worth a lot to you if you want it back so badly. I know you, I know what you do to your competition..."

"Well, if you really know me then you must know it's a bad idea to test me like this," Hematite said. She was stoic, but her eyes held a visible warning.

"Must be some good stuff stored on this pearl. Let's say we crack it open, see what we find..."

"I would strongly advise you not to do that," Hematite said, now visibly furious.

"Must be really good," the boss grinned from behind the screen.

"All right, I'll bargain with you. 10% of what our trade routes bring us."

Even as she spoke, the pearl could feel her tracker going off at the side of her gem. Hematite would find her, eventually.

"20% seems more reasonable," the boss offered with mocking amiableness. "I'll send a contact to you and you'll get the pearl back after the first payment."

"Unharmed," Hematite stressed.

"Unharmed," the boss agreed.

The screen fizzed out and the boss beckoned one of her underlings.

"Get one of the Sodalites. We're going to see what she's hiding in this thing," she said, pointing at the pearl.

The boss stressed the word 'unharmed' frequently (for all her bravado, she was still afraid of Hematite) as the hired Sodalite bore into her gem and probed it with wires, dragging out meaningless memory shreds, old news bulletins and inscrutable data. 'Unharmed' wasn't an option though, with her gem scraped at she lost three fingers, a chunk of her leg and a piece of her stomach.

"We'll just give her a drip later on," the Sodalite told them. "Her owner won't know the difference."

They dug her out for a full cycle, finding nothing, until the Sodalite shrugged her shoulders and put down her instruments.

"There's nothing in there," she said. The hole she'd made in the pearl was big enough to put her finger in.

"Then why does Hematite want it back so badly?" the boss asked, throwing her hands in the air.

"Maybe she's just fond of her," the Sodalite answered with a shrug.

They prised open her jaws after that and filled her with nacre to fill in the hole they'd dug out. The pearl felt a rush of something akin to nausea, her missing memories replaced with those of pearls who were long dead. It didn't matter though, what mattered was that they hadn't found Hematite's important information.

They put her in another sack and dumped her in a ditch, then sent the co-ordinates to Hematite's underlings. They picked her up a half-cycle later, and brought her straight to Hematite, scuffed and stained and ragged as she was.

"I did say unharmed," Hematite muttered, looking her up and down. "Did they hurt you?"

"Yes," the pearl answered.

Absently, as if from far away, she wished there was another pearl around to give her memories to. When Hematite found out, and she would find out, what had been done to her, she would have her crushed. She'd cost her dearly.

"What did they do? I want a full report."

"They opened my gem and probed it for information," the pearl replied. "When they were finished, they gave me a drip of filler nacre."

Hematite sighed, sat heavily at her desk and rubbed her temples.

"What did they get out of you? How much?"

"Nothing."

Hematite's head shot up, eyes narrowed.

"Nothing at all?" she asked incredulously.

"I hid the information below my own memories," the pearl replied.

Hematite laughed, relieved and pleasantly surprised.

"Genius," she laughed. "You just saved my entire operation."

"Not quite," the pearl said, aware that these words would likely be her last. "I buried the information as far as they could go, and my memory banks have been scrambled. I don't think I can recall them."

Hematite's face dropped, and for one awful moment the pearl saw the gem that was the terror of the Homeworld underground, instead of her distant, efficient owner. But then her face cleared, and she was smooth and impassive again.

"That's a pain," was all she said.

They sat in silence for a while, Hematite deep in thought with her chin on her hands and the pearl sitting across from her wondering when the other shoe would drop.

"I'm going to order a polish for you," Hematite said at last. "Some new apparel too. Then we can put this whole mess behind us. Those gems that took you are being taken care of as we speak."

She got up and crossed the room with two large strides, standing right in front of the pearl. She reached out and stroked her gem, feeling for the gaps.

"I think we'll be keeping you in from now on," she said, more to herself than the pearl. "I wouldn't like to lose you again."

…..

 _ **Fortiter in Re, Suaviter in Modo**_

 _(The following is an audio message transmitted from an unknown location)_

This is Kunzite 46L of the terraforming party for the dwarf planet circling in the nebula Gamete 166Y. This will be my last transmission, our communicators are running out of power and it's unlikely that we will find a safe source of energy at this time.

I want to talk about the things I have seen on this planet.

Our party was a small one, along with myself there were fourteen other Kunzites for research, a collection of fifty Rubies for terraforming, a platoon of ten Jaspers for resisting threats, three Chalcedonies for communications and a pearl that the Jaspers smuggled with the cargo. We didn't know the pearl was there until we landed and we saw no harm in its presence, it kept the Jaspers occupied and stopped them making trouble, so we let it roam around the hub.

On the dwarf planet's 75th cycle one of the Rubies hit a crack in the planet's core and it woke up a hive of zoatoxes. I think they were hibernating, they didn't come up on our scanners. I've always said we needed to capture live specimens but...

...anyway, once they woke they started breeding. We kept them out of the hub to the best of our abilities, but we lost about 50% of the building and we could only fortify the laboratories and the rest pod dorms.

We were doing fine for a while, but the Jaspers that were supposed to be guarding us ran low on morale...they couldn't handle seeing what the zoatoxes did to their platoon mates, I guess I understand...they got a Kunzite I knew early on, we worked on deep conditioning projects together, and when I saw her...

 _(Audio breaks off here, muffled speech)_

The Jaspers got picked off one by one. I used to think they were a weak unit, until one of those things came for me, and I just...

...this is why we need to study live specimens. If this audio ever reaches any gem, let that be what you take from this account. We need to study live specimens so we won't freeze up when they come at us...

...I'm getting off-track. As I'd said before, the pearl that the Jaspers smuggled in was free to roam around. It was in the west section of the building when the zoatoxes infested, we assumed it was gone. It turned up after eight cycles, almost completely unharmed. It emerged in our fortified quarters through the atmosphere vents.

The zoatoxes broke through our barricades only two cycles later, and the remaining Jaspers were useless. But the pearl...

 _(Audio breaks off, silence for thirty parsecs)_

The pearl didn't even have a weapon, we didn't have any. It just picked up a strafing pole and threw itself at them. It killed ten of them while we were fixing the barricade. It didn't even get scratched.

It kept doing this. Every time the barricade was split, the pearl killed any zoatox that made it through with a strafing pole. I know it sounds unbelievable, if I hadn't seen it for myself I'd think it was crazy.

The only viable theory I can come up with is that the pearl doesn't fear the zoatox the way the rest of us do. It's not built for fighting, nor is it trained in any way. So why would it fare better against the enemy than a Jasper that is specifically bred for this purpose?

Because we other gems are greatly distressed seeing our colleagues, our _friends,_ taken over by these creatures. There is also the way that the zoatoxes move, it's like nothing I've ever seen before. It should not be able to move the way it does, it's impossible. I must admit I froze myself on seeing one up close, I just couldn't get my body to move away from it.

The pearl suffers no such hesitation. It displays no fear, no anger, nothing to suggest that killing the beasts is anything more than another task to be completed. It does not stop, no matter how big or how vicious its opponent is. It is frightening how efficient it is.

I believe the nature of pearls needs to be studied, to find out how they are able to fight the way they do. Certainly if the Jaspers hadn't broken the law by smuggling this one on board, we would all be dead.

 _(This audio was never received. The planet in question was declared overrun with no survivors and detonated from orbit.)_


	6. Chapter 6

**A String of Pearls**

Lads, I'm going to be brutally honest here and if this is in any way inappropriate, please feel free to have a go at me in the comments. I have had an absolute gut punch of a week and there's not much of a sign that it's going to let up any time soon, and I am in dire need of a boost.

One of the places I like to go when I need some fanfic is the recs list on TV Tropes, and I've held out hope that my fics might get included in the rec list some time. It hasn't happened yet, but if any of ye reading are regular tropers and you think my work is good enough to warrant a rec, would you mind giving me one? It would really improve my overall disposition.

Now, enough gasbagging from me, on to abject terror! (Warning; the following chapters are horror themed and on the freaky side.)

…..

 _ **Enemy Mine**_

The planet was a small one, barely more than an atmospheric asteroid really, with very low mineral content and not much going for it. Space debris meant the comm signals were down more often than working, and life for the terraforming crew was austere by the standards of Homeworld.

They had their comforts, though, and few complained. They could synthesize a half-decent compound mix by fiddling with the process barrels, and though the Jaspers occasionally clashed with the Rubies, the Kunzites with the Chalcedonies and everyone with the lone Topaz, they got along well for the most part. And they had the pearl, of course, smuggled in with the tools.

They made an effort to keep the pearl in good condition, nothing too rough that might crack its gem. They would be unlikely to see Homeworld for a long time, and they understood that although they could make do without some things, the pearl was likely to be the only pearl they would ever have.

The pearl herself was in a constant state of exhaustion. There were one hundred gems on the substation and she was expected to service them all. She was dimly aware that she was, in theory, lucky that they didn't treat her as roughly as they might have but luck was relative. She might have welcomed a few cracks to her gem in exchange for staying in her charge pad for more than half a quadrant at a time.

In addition to her rest pod duties with whoever won the every-cycle lottery for her company, she was expected to paint on a smile, sing, dance, bring up amusing holo-casts to alleviate boredom, document important experiments and sit in perfect silence running the comm signals through her own nanotech system to jumpstart them when they failed.

Mostly, she was lonely. She had not seen another pearl in over seven orbits, and she longed for gesture-speak. She held long conversations with herself any free moment she had, speaking with one hand and answering with the other. She was aware she was going mad, and did not care.

It was during one of these conversations that she was suddenly answered back, in the most unlikely fashion.

The Jaspers had captured a hibernating zoatox, frozen it in carbonite and they were keeping it in lockdown, all of its many limbs secured under electro-cable chains. The Kunzites were studying it, though they could only stand to study it for about a single quadrant before they needed to get away from it. Even locked down, the creature had the power to unnerve.

The pearl had been recording the latest experiment and gesture-speaking to herself as she always did, when a flicker of familiar motion caught her attention.

The zoatox was in its second stage, roughly the size of a Jasper. Its segmented tail with the bladed tip was secured to the floor, but the ripple that spread from its tail to one of its lower legs looked uncannily like a pearl greeting. It had no eyes to speak of, but its olifactory glands fluttered gently.

It was insane, she knew. Zoatoxes understood nothing but feeding, breeding and dying. Every gem knew that.

But...every gem knew that pearls understood nothing but following orders.

She spoke to the creature, and imagined that it spoke back. It was clumsy gesture-speak, with none of the nuance and grace of pearls, but she thought it was beautiful in its own way. She began to think of it as a friend.

Finally, after one particularly hard cycle when she had serviced no less than seven gems in a row, when her **nothing** had hit so hard it left her gasping on the floor, when she hadn't been permitted to go to her charge pad for almost twenty cycles, she sought out her friend for solace. It would kill her, she thought as she recalled the code on the lock, but at least she would be at rest.

It did not kill her. When she released it, it embraced her with all of its long, sharp limbs. It was her friend, it trusted her with what was most important to it. When it shrivelled in on itself and died, she left the cell carrying one thousand of its offspring under her gem where it had pierced her and injected them.

The growing larvae had no interest in her gem; there was an instinct there, carried over from their parent. They fed instead on the **nothing,** mineral-rich as it was, and left her gem intact. When there was none of that left, they started eating each other, and she knew she had to pass them on.

Passing them was easy; in the rest pod, while the gem she was servicing was distracted by their orgasm, she could slip a larva into their gem setting without them noticing. She had serviced half of the substation before the first of the larvae hatched, bursting from the gem and feeding on the mass. They grew quickly, and as soon as their host was devoured they were ready to actively hunt the ones that had not been hosted.

It took less than three cycles for the substation to be overrun and every gem eaten alive, save for one. The planet faded from gem memory after a time, and the zoatox population there did not grow, but also did not die. There was mineral and substrate there for them to feed on, and though they had no hosts to breed on they were content to wait.

Eventually, they burrowed into the planet's core, spun their cocoons and began their hibernation cycle. The pearl went with them. She slipped into the central cocoon and though she did not sleep, she drifted into a kind of rest there with them, watching their limbs sway and flutter in their sleep.

…..

 _ **Valar Morghulis**_

"Please," Aquamarine begged quietly, trying to hang on to her dignity even in her desperation.

"This is a tall order," Jade told her non-committally.

"If you can't help me, nobody can," Aquamarine begged harder.

"Have you even tried?" Jade asked her. "There are Amethysts in this district, you should take your business there."

"She's friends with all the Amethysts! I tried before, they just took me back to her! Said they couldn't get involved."

Jade sighed, stroked her long straight hair and closed her eyes. She was thinking. Aquamarine waited, holding her breath.

"You truly think this is the way?" she said at last.

"As long as she's alive, I will never be free of her," Aquamarine said. Her voice broke and a few stray tears fell. She savagely wiped at them. "And it's not just me. She has others. We can't live like this!"

Jade sighed again, before rising to her feet. Standing, she was just a third of Aquamarine's size. It was hard to believe that this was a gem to fear.

"I will do this, but you must pay the price. You do not shatter a gem without cracking your own."

"I'm willing," Aquamarine said, squaring her shoulders.

Jade took out a small chisel and hammer from an ornate silver box. Aquamarine's gem was on her breast, and deftly Jade brought the hammer down and took a sliver. In an instant Aquamarine's spine twisted and hunched, and she gasped.

"We have a contract. Go now, it will be done."

She fled the temple, awkwardly running on her newly clumsy feet. Inside the temple, Jade added the sliver to the others and moved swiftly towards the back room.

The temple was unusual for the planet; terraformed long ago, it was a bustling trading post with many rough-and-ready shanty buildings erected for its populace. Jade had brought the temple with her to the trading post, slab by slab, and had re-built it over a period of seven orbits.

Her origins were a mystery, she had not come from Homeworld. It was known that if you wanted a gem dead, Jade would do it for you but her price was high. Nobody knew how she carried out her business.

"I have a Flourite," she told the gems in the back room. "Who wants to take this one?"

There were eighteen Pearls in all; spikes removed, kept away from the populace by the notoriety of the temple, living a life of gentle co-habitation. They were happy to serve Jade's purpose in return for a life of relative peace.

A small blue Pearl with long braided hair raised her hand; Jade knew her to be an eager little killer, but she wanted someone more cautious...

"It's been a while since you went out," she queried a tall white Pearl with tumbling maroon curls. "Would you like to work?"

"I will," the Pearl said with a smile. She was a sedate type, unruffled and cautious. Perfect for taking out a Flourite.

Jade prepared the solution; she ground up some Flourite shards and mixed them with a base corrosive and cytotoxin. She wrapped the solution in a fibrous shell while the Pearl carved a groove into her body to store it. This had always been the tricky part, but Pearls were so uniformly unafraid of death that they took these risks with ease.

The Pearl was dressed in skimpy diaphanous robes and one of Jade's outside contacts called to escort her. Jade watched them walk away as she always did, hoping the Pearl would come back unharmed.

She had not lost a Pearl yet, but she never stopped worrying for them. It had been easier for her in her youth when she had carried out the jobs herself, but she was old and her gem cracked, and it was so much easier for a beautiful Pearl to get close to the targets without them suspecting anything.

Before the cycle ended, the Pearl with the maroon curls was back. Her robes were torn a little but she was otherwise unharmed.

"It is done," she said, before joining the others in the back room of the temple.

Jade settled on her plinth to await the next request.


	7. Chapter 7

**A String of Pearls**

 **Chapter Seven**

Ramping up the horror because Robert Eggers' 'The Witch' isn't screening in my home country yet and I need something to fill the gap. Read at your own discretion.

…..

 **Trophies**

She languished in the back room of an old municipal building for a long time, and was only taken out after the new guidelines for pearls had been put in place. She was sold for a pittance, less than a quarter of what she might have been sold for prior to the isolation.

Naturally, she felt somewhat bitter. She was brand new and in excellent condition, silver-hued with blue eyes and long white hair. The **nothing** easily subdued her desire to lash out in anger and so she was silent as she was taken to her new owner.

Owners.

She was to be a barracks pearl.

It was unprecedented, no brand-new pearl had ever been taken to a barracks before. The panic hit her hard and the first quadrant she spent there she was in full glitch.

 _I can't do this. I have no memories to hold. I haven't been out._

She knew enough to know that the shared memories were what kept the average barracks pearl going until their inevitable death, having lived outside of the shops and encountered many other pearls along the way. She did not have this. She was brand-new.

When the glitch subsided, she met the owners. They were veteran Jaspers, twenty-three of them in all, wearing the gouges and splits in their gems from the zoatox war with pride. The first cycle she spent in their company, they tore a crevice in her gem that burned long after they stored her under the floorboards.

In the tiny space allocated to her, she simmered away angrily. The presence of the **nothing** would keep her from openly hating the Jaspers for their cruelty and carelessness, for the marks they left on her mass and the feel of their huge clumsy hands groping at her, but it existed as an abstract, deep in the core of her where the shared memories would have been. With no memory, there was only misery.

When song-weaving came to her from a pearl three barracks away, she only got the barest hint of the art. The other pearl was badly damaged and couldn't weave well, but it was enough. The germ of a plan grew in the pearl's mind, she built on it over time.

The Jaspers, for all their bravado, were still haunted by what they had seen during the war. They didn't see any reason to stay their tongues around the pearl. She found her weapon, and began to sharpen it.

She started rehearsing all of her motions in reverse but pitching them forward; it was easy, all pearls planned out their motions in anticipation. The Jaspers began to look at her with unease. They could tell something was off about her, but couldn't understand what. Her speech ran backwards and forwards at the same time, audibly slurred and yet perfect. The movement of her limbs and facial features seemed frozen in time, off on a distant plane.

She knew that her planned off-kilter movements were eerily similar to how the zoatox had moved, the Jaspers had often talked about how unnerving they had found it. They did not shapeshift or fuse to change their shapes; their exoskeletons had merely folded back in rapid succession and reformed to fit their purpose, so fast you could blink and they would have changed. They were like machines, but wholly organic.

Under the floorboards, she practised weaving but did not sing. Instead she laced her weaving with whispers, cryptic sentences or backwards speech. A favourite of hers was 'You're already dead,' backwards and forwards. She left these little pockets of sound in the Jasper rest pods.

The Jaspers slowly began to unravel, and they were no longer interested in her. In the name of keeping up appearances, they still took her into their rest pods, but did not touch her. While they were occupied with their rest, trying to block out what was tormenting them, she took something from the ones she had successfully gotten to. A sliver of their gem, or a hair, or a scrap of their uniform.

Half an orbit after being sold to the barracks, most of the Jaspers were giving her a wide berth, but not all of them. She upped the ante.

The zoatox scream was easy enough to mimic, even quietly, but at the sound level required for undetected weaving there was no way to make the Jaspers pick up on the sound. She solved this little problem by sending the scream into the air vents and making use of the echo.

By the time the last Jasper had lapsed fully into insanity and gone into retirement, the space under the floorboards was so full of the tokens she had taken from them that it groaned from the effort of keeping them all in.

…..

 **Red in Tooth and Claw**

Spinel did not trust pearls.

She had been offered one, before, shortly after her return to Homeworld. She had earned enough on her missions to live comfortably until retirement, and that life could include a pearl, but she decided against it.

"I know how they're made," she shrugged when asked.

"What's that got to do with anything?" Flourite asked, gently puzzled. "They're handy to have around. You don't have to get a fancy one..."

"No thank you," Spinel said, and that was that.

She was given a small flat. She was a small gem, and it suited her. She took a job delivering small cargo loads for a Tourmaline in the sixth quadrant, and for a while everything was fine.

The Tourmaline had a pearl.

Its function was purely decorative, as far as Spinel could tell. It was pale green, dressed in a sheath of some silver filmy stuff, and it did not move. Tourmaline placed in near the window and Spinel would have to pass it at least four times every cycle.

"Like it? I got it half price," Tourmaline bragged after catching Spinel staring. "You in the market for a pearl?

"No," Spinel answered, and left it at that.

There was an uncomfortable crawling sensation that she got every time she passed the pearl. She felt like it was watching her even when its back was to her. It was so still it unnerved her.

After a time, it began to affect her work. She was forgetful, so eager to escape the office that she forgot packages and had to go back for them. Tourmaline went easy on her but Spinel could tell she was reaching the end of her patience. The pearl's wide unblinking eyes observed her being scolded and she hated the pearl.

On one particularly awful cycle, Spinel finally snapped. She had run into a young Jade on her first drop-off, and it had put her on edge. When she returned to the office, Tourmaline wasn't there. But the pearl was.

The pearl was always there.

She had hurled the package straight at the pearl's head without even thinking, and a part of her was horror-struck watching it sail through the air at the pearl's unmoving form. But then time itself seemed to slow down, and just before the package could make contact the pearl curled in on itself, out of the way of the projectile.

 _Oh._

And with that one action, Spinel knew why she didn't trust pearls.

 _Jade had found the marks that indicated a tunnel, and was on the ground with her ear to the soil listening closely for movement. Spinel hopped from one foot to another, ready to grab Jade and run at a moment's notice._

" _There's no sound," Jade whispered. "I don't understand..."_

 _A crack in the clouds above caught their attention. Already edgy, suddenly they were both ready to flee._

" _A black flare," Spinel whispered. "Team 7C's gone."_

 _They couldn't flee in that direction, and the mountain pass was too tight to risk._

" _Come on," Spinel urged, crouching to let Jade get on her back. "We need to go now!"_

" _No, this doesn't make sense! Where are they?"_

 _A bare flicker of movement in a landscape that had been utterly still drew Spinel's gaze to it. Her eyes weren't as sharp as Jade's, but..._

 _Unfurling like a flower and reshaping itself into a form that was horribly familiar, the object Spinel had assumed was a rock placed all of its legs and demi-legs on the ground and sped towards them in less than three parsecs. Spinel had just enough time to grab Jade by the arm and hurl them both across the plain._

 _The zoatox screamed behind them and all around them, the scenery changed. Trees, boulders, shrubs, ditches, everything suddenly had a long serrated tail and endless teeth. Clinging to her back, Jade fired off a red flare._

 _Cursing herself, Spinel realized she should have known something was wrong. The trees hadn't moved in the wind, the rocks had been too uniform in shape, the ditches had all been the same size...she should have known._

 _She should also have known that the little gasp she had taken for an exclamation of fear from Jade had actually been the sound of Jade being plucked off of her back on the end of a barb-tipped tail. She didn't realize she had lost her partner until she reached the base camp._

The pearl had gone straight back into position, mired in stillness once again. Spinel stared at her, shuddering.


	8. Chapter 8

**A String of Pearls**

 **Chapter Eight**

 **Reason**

They are, without a doubt, the absolute worst squad in the barracks.

Fingers are pointed at their birth site, a crumbly little rock with only a few stable nutrients, naturally anything planted and grown there would come out...wrong. Fingers are pointed at their Flourite, who incredulously points in turn to the other Jasper squads who are perfectly capable specimens. In the end they cannot understand what's wrong with Squad 557-H, so they get sent on the very worst missions, the ones no other respectable Jasper squad would take up.

There's twelve of them in all; there should have been fourteen, but two disintegrated in the soil before emerging. They are as rowdy, thick-skulled and aggressive as any other Jasper, but they are all clumsy, have short attention spans and they cannot fuse to save their lives. They have mostly given up on the fusing; there's no need for them to fuse much anyway, most of their enemies tend to be small and terraforming is done mostly by Rubies.

They were as confused as anyone when they were given a pearl.

"It's a mistake," Jasper H11 said as soon as she opened the box. "This is meant for one of the other squads."

"It has our number on it," Jasper H7 said, tapping the label on the box.

"They must've labelled it wrong," Jasper H11 insisted. "We did not earn a pearl. Our test runs are the worst in the district."

"Maybe it's meant to motivate us?" Jasper H5 wondered, lifting the pearl's spindly arm gingerly between her two enormous fingers.

"Don't touch it!" Jasper H9 hissed, slapping H5's hand away. "If it's not ours, we'll get in trouble for touching it."

"We could ask it," Jasper H3 suggested with a shrug. Everyone's eyes swivelled to the pearl, who had been silent and still since they opened the box.

"There is no mistake," it told them, its high glassy voice sounding odd in the squadroom. "I was sent here for Squad 557-H."

They all looked at each other, dumbfounded. Who would give them a pearl? And it was a nice one too, not particularly fancy but pleasant to look at. It was pink-toned with short wine-red hair, clad very simply in a tunic that matched its hair.

"This is some sort of joke," Jasper H8 groaned, fatalistic as always. "They're going to have a laugh at us, I'm telling you now."

Cycles passed, and for the most part, fearing that H8 had a point, they avoided the pearl. It sat in its box and smiled at them as they walked in and out, and they found themselves smiling back. They ended up taking it with them on missions, just in case any other squad decided to steal it while they were gone. It was while they were away from Homeworld on a mission that lasted half an orbit that they finally put the pearl to some sort of use.

It was silly, really. They had the pearl hold tools for them while they did repairs, tools they could easily have put on the ground. They had it tell them stories they had all heard a hundred times before as newly hatched gems. They had it pick up signals from Homeworld so they could watch races and catch up on episodic Holocasts. They had it find a formula for a gallium substitute.

They could have easily done these things without a pearl, but while the pearl was there...why not make use of her?

On the last leg of the journey back to Homeworld, they intercepted a distress signal from a nearby terraformed planet and were obliged to go down to offer help. Seven other squadrons were there already, and they were tersely informed that the planet was a write-off; it was infested with zoatox, right to the core. The important part was getting all the Rubies, Kunzites and Peridots off the planet safely.

They had packed their own ship tightly with fleeing terrified gems and were about to take off when they realized something was badly wrong.

"The zoatoxes have cut off the substrate byline," one of the Kunzites said when she found out why they weren't taking off. "It has to be reconnected manually."

There was a grim silence. Going out there was to greet death head on; the whole area was swarming. But if they waited, the zoatox would eventually burrow through and devour them all. They could blow up the ship, taking all of them and some of the swarm with them. None of them were good options, but at least the first one meant some gems would survive. But who would be willing to make that sacrifice? And who would be able to get more than a few pelmetres without being eaten alive.

"I can do it," the pearl piped up. The ship's occupants jumped; they had forgotten she was there.

"You can't fight those things," Jasper H11 scoffed, but fondly; at least she was trying.

"I don't need to. Zoatoxes don't have any regard for pearls, it is well documented. I can walk right past them."

"It's right," the Kunzite gasped, suddenly realizing she might survive after all. "They don't care about pearls! It can reconnect the byline and we can all get out of here!"

Squad H557 squirmed internally; going out voluntarily into the screaming maw of death was one thing, sending their dainty pet out in their place was quite another. But what choice did they have?

They sent the pearl out with a set of connectors to fix the current and a tube of sealant to plug the breach; it would last just long enough to get them off the planet and into the stratosphere. She even gave them a peppy little salute before they pushed her out of the air vent.

The Jaspers watched, tense as bowstrings, as the pearl ran through corridors and up steps and crawled through repair tunnels, thinking any moment one of the zoatoxes would notice her and eat her in a single bite. At one awful point it did look like one of them was getting too close, but the pearl made some sort of gesture and it backed off.

She reached the byline, deserted now that the zoatox had finished with it. It was down the side of a docking platform, a sheer drop was in store for anyone that didn't keep their balance. Normally, they would have had safety equipment but there was none on the ship. The pearl worked on the byline hanging from the platform by her feet.

As she sealed the breach, the engines of the ship roared into glorious life and the Kunzite hit the controls with frenzied relief. This knocked the pearl off balance, and to the squad's horror she fell.

" _Don't take off yet!"_ they yelled in perfect unison.

The pearl managed to catch a strafing pole on the way down and was dangling there, waiting for her slight weight to pull it out of the wall and send her hurtling to her doom, when suddenly a wall from below caved in and out stepped a Jasper fusion bigger than any on record.

"Let go," she called. "I'll catch you!"

The pearl did as she was told, plummeted in free fall until she landed very firmly in the outstretched hands of the fusion. With the pearl held tightly against her chest, cradled in the palm of her hand, the fusion crushed zoatoxes under her feet and smashed them into walls until she reached the ship, already floating away.

With a gigantic leap, she landed on the open bay door, and that was as long as the fusion could be held. She broke apart then, all twelve members of Squad 557-H scattered across the floor, breathing hard. The pearl was wedged under two of them, as though they were still afraid to let her go.

The twelve-gem fusion did not go on the record; many of the eyewitnesses simply didn't believe what they were seeing.

…..

 **Fandom**

Most pearls have the ability to feel dread at the thought of going to a barracks to serve Jaspers, even if it's only a fleeting fear. Squad 649-J's newly acquired purchase was no exception, until they opened the box and the first words out of the squad leader's was

"Hey, don't you think it looks a bit like White Lapis?"

White Lapis was a newish sensation; she'd been performing for a long time as a regular Lapis, until she took to wearing all-white ensembles and writing songs about love and purity. It was a gimmick, to be sure, but a gimmick that was working. A good chunk of Homeworld were obsessed with her, and so were Squad 649-J.

The pearl was blue-toned, a much paler shade than White Lapis, but she had White Lapis' bobbed hair and her clothes, a sleeveless blouse and knee length skirt, happened to be white. One of the Jaspers lifted her gently out of the box and perched her on a table.

"Can you sing?" the Jasper asked?

"Yes," the pearl answered.

"Do you know _Alabaster Days_?" another Jasper asked.

"No, but I can find it and copy it," the pearl answered.

"If you can do that, you should copy the whole album!" one of the Jaspers at the back shouted.

"Very well," the pearl agreed.

Indeed, it seemed the only thing the Jaspers wanted her for was to imitate White Lapis. Her voice was different; White Lapis' was high and smooth, a touch plaintive, the pearl's was high and clear and ironically pure. She copied White Lapis' concert outfits as much as she could with their limited resources, and while she was left alone during most of the cycle, the last quadrant was always a concert where she sang the same songs over and over.

To pass the time, she watched White Lapis' holocasts to get her hand gestures and stances right. At one concert, when she effectively parroted White Lapis' trademark _love-you-love-you_ gesture half of the Jaspers actually screamed with delight.

But good things come to an end, and on the return home the Jaspers were all talking about getting to meet the _real_ White Lapis; they were going to a concert of hers and she had agreed to meet with them personally to thank them for their service to Homeworld. The pearl wondered how long it would take for them to grow tired of the fake after meeting the real one, and put her to more standard uses.

But when the Jaspers returned that quadrant, they were sullen and angry. Some of them actually looked like they would cry.

"Hey pearl," one of the more upset ones called.

"What can I do for you?" the pearl asked pleasantly.

"Can you sing _Alabaster Days_ for me?"

"Of course."

She sang, and slowly the mood in the room lifted, just a little.

"You know," the Jasper told her, "I think your version's better."

…..

Author's note:

The difference between White Lapis and the pearl is more or less the difference between Lynn Minmay and Ranka Lee singing 'My Boyfriend is a Pilot.'

Also, the track 'Mobile Suit' from the Gundam Unicorn soundtrack is the inspo track for the first story.


	9. Chapter 9

**A String of Pearls**

 **Chapter Nine**

Apologies for the long hiatus, I'm getting as bad as the show in that respect!

…..

 _ **Waiting**_

Things in the small collection of rundown tenements known collectively as 'Rubytown' were pretty bad.

Aside from the obvious lack of room, lack of substrate, lack of resources and a lack of any meaningful leadership, with every new Ruby crammed into the districts there seemed to be a decline in overall intelligence.

It was cruel, Ruby often thought, to think of the new arrivals in this way, but it couldn't be ignored. She was a much older Ruby, nearly 500 orbits, and she remembered how vital and collected her newly hatched sisters once were. They were trickling out slowly, sent off on salvaging missions on other planets or crushed for insubordination, and the newer Rubies were slow and confused.

They were clearly made in thin soil. Rubies had always been small, but never so _shallow._ Whenever what passed for a Ruby leader egged them on to civil disobedience, they panicked and ran at the first sight of trouble.

So really, getting tossed in isopod was something of a relief.

Her sentence was small, anyway. She had been an active participant in the riot, but she had argued that she'd just been trying to get home through the crowd and strangely enough, it worked. 120 cycles in isopod wasn't much, really. She'd been in longer.

Another stroke of luck, the pod they had dumped her in was one of the older containers, and there were chinks in the wall. Just big enough to see outside, and although she couldn't move she could just about see the quadrangle. It made a big difference; 120 cycles in the dark could drive a gem mad, but having something to look at would help the time move faster.

It was a nice area, one of the upscale quadrants, between some department stores and a tracer hub. Gems flitted in and out the entire cycle, Amethysts on rotation, Emeralds and Topazes with Larimars hanging off of their arms, Aquamarines and Lapis Lazuli and even the legendary Almandine wearing what looked like a bunch of spokes on a wire brush (it was probably a work of genius.)

And it was nice to see pearls out and about. Ruby had only ever seen them from a distance, skulking around better-heeled districts, and even then the ones she saw tended to belong to mob bosses and criminals. These were a better sort altogether, pristine and glimmering faintly in the light. They followed behind their owners, matching them step for step, eyes directed at the ground.

On cycle 24 of isopod, Ruby noticed a pattern for the first time. A Morganite, probably one of the ones working in finance, walked with her pearl as far as the outside of the tracer hub, spoke a few words to it and then left it in the quadrangle. There it stood until its owner returned at the end of the cycle.

Ruby couldn't understand it. Pearl theft was a huge problem, even with the new anti-theft technology. Why would any gem risk their pearl getting stolen? Was it a way of showing off her wealth, that she could afford to leave it standing in the open? Ruby puzzled over it for a long time.

It was a nice pearl, even as pearls go. It was pale blue and dressed in indigo gauze, its hair elaborately braided down to its knees. It would have been tempting for anyone to just grab it right off of the quadrangle, nobody was around to stop them.

But then, Ruby realized, there were holo-cams mounted on poles all over the quadrangle. Perhaps it was some sort of sting (she'd seen a few of those in progress.) Perhaps the Hematite was trying to actively tempt thieves so she could track them. It was rare for Hematites to work in law enforcement, but not unheard of.

But then again, what career criminal wouldn't immediately suspect the same thing as Ruby? It was too obvious to risk taking the pearl, it was probably loaded with tracking appliances.

By the time the pattern changed, Ruby had used up half of her sentence puzzling over why the Hematite would be so careless.

Then the end of the cycle came, and Hematite did not return to collect the pearl.

It didn't seem to phase the pearl, it stood as still and silent as it had the previous cycles.

The next cycle began with the pearl in the quadrangle, covered with dew. Ruby's gaze was rooted to it, wondering and wondering more.

Three cycles passed, and the pearl still had not moved. It was gathering dirt now and didn't look as pristine as it had before. Its gaze was fixed in the direction it expected its owner to appear in. Its braid was starting to unravel in the wind.

There was a rare atmoburst, and before the shutters could be pulled over the quadrangle some of the water had caught the pearl and a number of grumbling gems. They went off to dry themselves, but the pearl remained where she was, dripping softly. Her hair was almost loose now and her skin smudged and dirty.

Ruby couldn't look away, even if she'd wanted to. How long were they going to let the pearl stay there? Why hadn't somebody come to collect it yet? Surely if something had happened to Hematite, the authorities would take possession of her pearl?

She knew, in her mind, that the pearl did not have a will of its own, it was not a real gem and could not act without an order. But somewhere in her gut, almost wordlessly, she wanted the pearl to move, to do something to save itself. Even the most simple of organisms acted out of self-preservation, why couldn't this pearl?

She would do something, Ruby told herself, once she was out of isopod. She would report it to the Amethyst that let her out, or look to the news for any idea of what had happened to Hematite, or if she felt really crazy she would pick it up herself and see how far she got with it.

But finally, just two cycles before her release, a tamicar pulled up to the quadrangle and two Sodalites hopped out. Going by their uniforms, they were from the processing plant. They scanned the pearl with some gadget and picked her up, loading it into the tamicar and rushing away.

The last two cycles were uneasy, almost painful. It felt like there was a hole in the landscape where the pearl had been, as much a fixture as the benches and the mounted holo-cams. Ruby's eyes burned with the loss, it occupied her mind feverishly.

When the rebellion began, there was a lot of talk about the renegade pearl being infected by some awful virus that was making it act the way it did. But Ruby saw clearly now, and she saw a pearl acting of its own free will, and it horrified her more than any zoatox ever had or ever would.

…..

 **Alone**

It was mostly luck that lead to the pearl's survival.

The Kunzite that had smuggled it onboard had packed it carefully inside an iron crate along with seventeen packages of loose polymer, and the crate had withstood the initial crash, the blast and only burst open when it hit the surface of the planet. The polymer packages had been flung out along with the pearl and made for a soft landing.

None of the ship's gems were so fortunate. Most were destroyed outright; the ones that escaped the burning ship were a single Kunzite, two Jaspers and a Chalcedony.

"I can salvage some of the casters," Chalcedony had said as they stared into the roaring flames. "We can call Homeworld for rescue."

What little remained after the flames had finally died was patchy and she lacked the proper equipment, but Chalcedony was convinced she could build a basic holocaster. It would be crude but workable. Kunzite assisted her; her specialty was chemistry but she could manage some simple tech. The Jaspers made and then patrolled their camp, for the planet was occupied by some unseen creatures that could be hostile.

In the beginning, the pearl was there for morale. When the planet's small sun went down (and it was down more than up) she sang for them, told stories and occasionally went somewhere private with them to relieve them sexually. But as the cycles wore on, it was asked to do more manual tasks; fetching vegetation to bio-power the holocaster, fetching water to cool it down, holding tools, as the other gems started taking more breaks.

The Jaspers' gems were badly cracked, it could see that. They had been in the bunkers with the other Jaspers and had only survived by being buried under the rest. Their speech was garbled and their masses were splintering.

But what ultimately killed them was each other. Running low on patience and quick to anger, one of them had tried to take the pearl for relief and the other had demanded it returned. They had fought, one had grabbed a rock and smashed the gem of the other, destroying her. The winner did not survive her victory long; a chunk had been gouged out of her gem and she crumbled within parsecs.

Tensions were running high between Chalcedony and Kunzite too; Kunzite felt Chalcedony was lazy and not as smart as she thought she was. Chalcedony thought Kunzite was looking down on her despite being useless at getting them the help they needed. They both feared the other would attack them, and they refused to be caught unawares.

Chalcedony programmed some of the leftover machine parts to emit a shock if she jabbed it in Kunzite's direction. Once, rattled and on edge, she had swung it at the pearl, but the pearl surprisingly shrugged it off as nothing. Meanwhile, the Kunzite gathered foul-smelling plant sap from the nearby marsh, planning to drip it into Kunzite's cracks as she rested. Just a little, each cycle, to keep her from being dangerous.

But ultimately, Chalcedony (foggy-brained from the sap) stood on her own weapon and cracked her gem beyond repair. The shards of her gem were reduced to dust, having been already so weakened. Kunzite's victory almost made her forget that they still had no way to leave the planet, and when her crumbling gem was dissolved by the traces of the sap she had forgotten to wipe from her hands, she was still crowing about her hated rival.

The pearl sat in the ruins of the camp for a while, doing nothing in particular. The Kunzite had removed her spike early on, thinking they could use the charge, and her clear mind was not subjected to the kind of sensory overload most spikeless pearls had to endure. The planet was quiet, and she was alone, and there were no orders and probably never would be again.

After a few cycles, she walked away, going nowhere in particular. She came across the native species; some large herbivores and a few small scavenging rodent-like creatures, they were quiet and skittish, but they tolerated her well enough. She just wanted to sit and watch them, and that was fine with them.

Walking became her chief habit, she liked to find herself in new places. She made a note of every mountain, valley, ocean, lake, marsh, anything she could find, and what lived on it. The planet's life was not very varied, but it was peaceful, and so was she. They got on well.

When song weaving reached her on the little planet, she worked for a long time to send a song back, loaded with memory and information. Her sisters were happy for her, though they missed her. They could have found a way to send a gem team to the planet to rescue her, but they knew there was no need.

Pearls tended to degrade faster than other gems, and without the means to repair herself she let herself go. In the end she waded out into the ocean and let the salt wash her away inch by inch, staring up into the sky, cradled by the water.


	10. Chapter 10

**A String of Pearls**

 **Chapter Ten**

Continuing my burst of sudden free-time-having creativity, I bring you another chapter of this fic, as well as another spamming of my now-available-on-Amazon novel that I finally got finished and uploaded. The better I can do with my original work the more free time I'll have to work on both original and fanworks, so please excuse me for spamming the link. Also for a limited time, you can get it for free, I only ask that if you do get it for free that you leave an honest review after reading:

dp/B07BGSPPBY

And now, back to our somewhat regularly scheduled pearl-related shenanigans.

…..

 _ **Champion**_

It started as a joke. It was never meant to go so far.

The matches had been getting dull; the initial thrill of running something illegal right under the noses of Homeworld's higher ups ran out after a few dozen matches, and there were only so many times you could watch a big burly gem beat the stuffing out of another big burly gem before the shine wore off.

They had never had any problems sourcing the fighters; most of the time they were retired Jaspers looking for some action, or Amethysts stuck working boring jobs who missed out on breaking up riots and storming black market compounds. Occasionally a rogue Topaz or a collection of fused Rubies would join in just for flavour, but nine times out of ten the match was Jasper vs Amethyst.

The betting pool still brought in decent cash, but even the regular betters were getting tired of the same old thing. The Hematite running the operation was not a gem that tended to get stressed out, but this was worrying her. The betters were starting to drift away.

"I don't know, throw something in," her companion Larimar had muttered after listening to her complain about it again and again. "Something they're not expecting. A pearl or something."

Hematite stopped dead in her tracks.

 _A pearl?_

A pearl had no chance of winning even if they wrapped it in protective layers and put an electron charge on it, but it would be something to see. Hematite knew there were certain subsections of Gem society that paid good money to see pearls destroyed. On a personal level she thought those gems were creeps, but their money was as good as anyone's.

"Yes, a pearl," she mused out loud. "Why not? For the novelty..."

"Well, don't look at mine," Larimar retorted, pulling her own pearl onto her lap. "I just had it redesigned."

"Of course not," Hematite scoffed. "I'm not going to use a _good_ one. We can get some worn-out scrap from the black market, doll it up to look like new. The patrons won't know the difference."

They found the 'worn-out scrap' two cycles later; it was a former barracks pearl, with its gem still miraculously intact. Hematite set Larimar up to make the pearl look as sweet and dainty as possible. She was given a redesign in shades of pink and aqua, her hair cut to a neat waifish bob and outfitted in a plain white frock with a single layer of ruffles on the edge. It looked harmless.

As expected, the first arena match of the night was sold out in parsecs, gems clamoured to see the pearl get smashed to pieces live and in person. Even the regular fighters begged to be the ones to do it; in the end Hematite chose a particularly large Jasper with deep battle scars to contrast the tiny pearl.

"Just...do your best," Hematite said when the pearl asked what her orders were.

The fight started, and it looked like it would be over in parsecs when the Jasper swung an enormous hammer down on the pearl.

Except the pearl dodged out of the way, nimbly ran up the handle of the hammer and the Jasper's arm and drove a loose screw she had found somewhere into the Jasper's eye. The Jasper howled, pulled away, and the pearl swung around her head to the back of her neck and drove the screw in there.

The audience were silent, too dumbstruck to comprehend what they were seeing.

Once the Jasper's spine had been immobilized and she collapsed to the ground, the pearl dropped neatly to the floor, managed to pick up the hammer and brought it down on the Jasper's head, hitting her gem dead one.

Boom. The match was over.

Hematite couldn't find a single word. The pearl stood in the middle of the arena, in the dust of her conquered foe, waiting for instructions. The audience mumbled and stared. They had paid good money to see the pearl destroyed, but this was so unexpected they just didn't know how to react.

"Well, it looks like we have a winner," Larimar said at last, striding with (fake) confidence and holding up the pearl's skinny little arm in victory.

For the next few cycles, as they wrestled with themselves over what to do, the pearl sat in a corner with Larimar's pearl, calmly waiting for more orders.

"It was a fluke," Larimar hissed for what seemed like the hundredth time. "They are not made for fighting, for Core's sake! I slapped mine the other day and she fell over! It was just a defective Jasper."

"That Jasper won fifteen matches," Hematite hissed back.

"Well, then, she must have taken damage," Larimar retorted. "That hammer wasn't as solid as it should have been, otherwise the pearl would never have been able to lift it. She was on the verge of crumbling anyway and just didn't have the decency to say it to you."

Reluctantly, they staged another match. This time, they chose an Amethyst who was relatively new to the arena, and proven to be strong.

Her strength didn't matter in the end; the pearl prised a long shred of metal from the fence and dug it in behind the Amethyst's gem, snapping it in two.

When they sent another Jasper in afterwards, the pearl managed to break both of its arms by dodging her throws at the last minute, then stepped neatly on her windpipe and kicked her gem until it was destroyed.

The audience were morbidly fascinated, and it kept them coming back every time. No matter who the pearl was set up against, she always managed to find a way to kill them.

Not beat. _Kill._

Even in the roughest matches before the introduction of the pearl, a gem shattering was a rare occurrence. The loser usually yielded when they felt their lives were in danger, but going up against the pearl meant they had no time to yield.

It was frightening, too, how the pearl always managed to find something to turn into a weapon. Even when they removed as much debris from the arena as possible she found something; a piece of the flooring, a chunk of concrete, a shoe thrown by an audience member, even her own severed arm. Her preferred technique, it seemed, was the opponent gem's own manifested weapon.

She had no shortage of opponents. Hematite had worried that the pearl's vicious track record would stop other gems from wanting to fight her, but it had actually become a matter of pride for the fighting gems to be the one to finish her off. They died in their tens, and then twenties, and after a time in their hundreds.

Rumours were spread that the pearl was infected with a zoatox, and it still didn't stop gems wanting to fight or audiences wanting to watch. Hematite desperately wanted to end the matches and have the pearl liquidated but the proceeds made up so much of her income now that she couldn't afford it.

At the end of every match, she had to bring the pearl back to her home, perch it in the corner with Larimar's pearl, and hope that the pearl had decided not to target her.

 _Sister, you are doing well. Are you happy?_

 _I am quite happy. Many are gone. I shall destroy many more._

 _Why did you do this? You said you wanted your gem destroyed. You gave me your memories._

 _She told me to do my best. And so I did._

…..

 _ **Distracted**_

It was a bad idea to bring a pearl with them. That's what they had been told, even though they all spluttered and insisted that they didn't have a pearl, it was against the rules.

(They did, of course. She was under the floorboards.)

The cycle before they were due to leave, five of them individually had the idea to take her out of hiding and stow her in the pipes of the ship. They happened to bump into each other on the way to get her, and swore each other to secrecy. The pearl, for her part, amiably crouched in the pipe for the entire journey with no more damage than a face full of soot upon landing.

The planet was meant to be mostly unoccupied. A handful of zoatoxes, that was what they had been told. When they were rushed, Jasper 72-BF panicked, grabbed the pearl and ran for her life. Somehow, they managed to get away.

Jasper co-ordinated with some of the others that had gotten away, but they were deep in zoatox territory now with no hope of getting out. The ship was overrun and they were a long way from the nearest warp pad.

"We go in shield formation," the defacto leader told them grimly. "Everyone takes a turn on the outside, no exceptions."

"What about the pearl?" Jasper 72-BF asked.

"Doesn't count," the leader spat.

So they proceeded in shield formation, the main body of the group surrounded by the shield Jaspers looking every way possible for danger, and the pearl skipping nonchalantly three paces behind them. When they did trigger a nest awakening, the pearl moved out of the way to let them fight, as ordered.

Three cycles in, they were down to just seven individuals, worn out and wounded. The warp pad was still a good distance away.

"I don't think I can do this any more," Jasper 72-BF mumbled, more to herself than anyone listening. "Just shatter my gem now. It's better than being taken by those things."

The other gems groaned in agreement. Their leader had been taken during the last attack and their morale had been taken with her.

"Excuse me?"

The pearl's melodious trill was incongruous to their surroundings and their situation, so at first they thought they had imagined it. Some of them had even forgotten the pearl was still there, unharmed.

"Um...I think I can help? If you need it," she insisted.

The Jaspers gaped at her. The pearl rarely spoke unless spoken to, and even then not much beyond stroking someone's ego or agreeing with something.

"Okay, whatever," Jasper 72-BF muttered, sinking to the ground. "Let's hear it."

"Zoatoxes are not interested in pearls, and I can communicate with them. I can lead them away from you if you like."

The Jaspers looked at each other in stunned silence. This was an option?

"Why didn't you say anything before?" one of them finally asked.

"Jasper 46-BF ordered me to stay silent. She is gone now, and the order is nullified."

That made an awful sort of sense. To think, they'd had a way out of this mess the whole time but one of them had screwed it up by throwing her weight around. Typical.

"Okay, sounds good to me," Jasper 72-BF admitted. "I'm willing to try anything. But what happens if you lead them away and we get to the warp pad without you?"

"You leave me here," the pearl shrugged. "I will be fine."

They didn't like it, but it was better than nothing.

They continued in shield formation, but this time the pearl walked ahead of them, gesturing back for them to stop when she had located a hive. They watched from a safe distance as she made some odd movements with her limbs, and to their astonishment the zoatox got up and left.

"How did you do that?" Jasper 72-BF whispered when she got a chance.

"Pearl gesture-speak and zoatox language are very similar," the pearl replied.

 _Pearls have their own language?_

They located the warp pad, and as expected it was crawling with zoatox. The pearl readied herself to go to them, but before she did she gave Jasper 72-BF a small object made of cloth.

"Please give this to the next pearl you own," she said, and then she was gone.

They warped out as soon as the last zoatox clattered away, landing to answer hundreds of questions about the planet, the infestation and how they had managed to survive. They explained about the pearl but it was laughed off as impossible, and they were all determined to be suffering from 'zoa-pox', the madness that usually hit after encountering the zoatox.

A new pearl was illicitly purchased for the remainder of the squadron, and on Jasper 72-BF's first night with her she gave her the little object.

"What is it?" she asked curiously, still thinking of the pearl wandering around alone on that planet surrounded by zoatox and shuddering.

"It is for pearls to know," the new pearl answered, and no more was said.


	11. Chapter 11

**A String of Pearls**

 **Chapter Eleven**

Author's note: I'm going to be an obnoxious git and spam the link to my novel on Amazon here, for a limited time it's free (and knowing it's there is giving me more motivation to write than I've had for a long time) : dp/B07BGSPPBY

With that out of the way, back to our regularly scheduled angst.

…..

 _ **Needs**_

She had been impressive, once.

She had been a shining beacon on the battlefield for a long time, it was even said that if it wasn't for the four Diamonds being there at the right time she might have become a Diamond herself. An unlucky swipe of a zoatox's serrated tail had been enough to keep her out of the climactic battle and gem history was made without her.

Still, Emerald retired with full honours, more money than she could have ever earned in peacetime and a small measure of political power that she hardly used. A small sector of Homeworld's manufacturing district was under her control, and it was enough for her.

The crack in her gem made her nervous, but she never did anything about it, preferring to pretend it wasn't there. At the start of her retirement, it had only been a scratch, but it deepened every orbit. It ran under her manifested form, where it couldn't be seen without special tools. It was easy to ignore, for a while.

 _It's just an old war wound. Nothing more. We all have them._

She made a huge mistake on the budget for the orbit quarter, one that sent the factories she had under her control struggling to catch up with the rest of Homeworld. A Kunzite was dispatched to look over the accounts, and she did so shaking her head and muttering under her breath, to Emerald's utter humiliation.

"These are a mess," Kunzite grumbled. "Half of the spreadsheets aren't filled in and the data that's here doesn't make any sense. How have you been operating all this time?"

"A few things were overlooked," Emerald shrugged, trying to appear casual.

"Overlooked? This is more like willful blindness," Kunzite retorted.

That hit a nerve, because Emerald's vision had been warped lately. Everything was hazy and numbers floated when she tried to look at them. She'd thought she had done a good job of hiding it.

"Look, not everyone's got a good head for number-crunching," said Kunzite. "But Homeworld can't afford these kinds of mistakes. Just get a pearl in to do the spreadsheets and data work, it'll pay for itself in efficiency. You don't even have to get a new one, just a working one."

"Okay, that's not a bad idea," Emerald agreed, though she barely suppressed a shudder.

Like many veterans of the zoatox war, Emerald had a visceral dislike for pearls. It only intensified when she heard rumours that they could carry zoatox spawn without being harmed in the process. But really, what choice did she have?

She picked up a second-hand pearl, one that had ended up in the impound and had been resold instead of being liquidated. She couldn't see it particularly well given her vision problems, but she saw enough to know she wanted to be as far away from it as possible. She gave it a dank little alcove to work through the data banks and tried to ignore it.

She still had to bring it home in the last quadrants though, and it was harder to find a corner to banish it to at her apartment, so she left it outside on the balcony until they had to go to work again.

At first, everything seemed to be going well. The pearl's number-crunching got the factory back working on schedule, and it was on alert for any mistakes Emerald was making. But less than an orbit had passed before Emerald realized that it wasn't just her vision that was affected by the crack, but her hearing too. She misheard multiple reports from the assembly line supervisors and the Kunzite was back again, muttering at the data readouts.

"I don't understand... _kshhh_...happening again, and not even... _tpschieeee..._ checked the pearl, it's working just... _.kshchiiiitschop..._ it must be coming from somewhere else," she told Emerald, half-heard through the haze.

Now, Emerald was afraid. She knew what happened to gems with cracks that couldn't be repaired. Homeworld couldn't afford to let her maintain her lifestyle when she was basically defective. She would be sent to one of the veteran's homes until her gem could no longer support her mass. That was if they didn't decide she was a waste of resources and shatter her right there and then.

She convinced her higher-ups to let her work from home, under the pretense that the pearl was able to crunch the numbers more efficiently from there with better access to the mainframe database. It worked.

For a while.

Then her vision and hearing weren't the only things affected. Her legs were starting to shake as she walked, and her talking was becoming slurred and unintelligible. When she received a contact request from none other than Yellow Diamond, she thought she was finally doomed.

Except, at the last possible moment, the pearl toddled in from its dank little corner, froze the contact image on Emerald's face and imitated Emerald's voice so perfectly even Emerald herself was convinced for a parsec that she was the one talking. The pearl smoothly apologized for any mistakes made and assured the Diamond that her work would be flawless from now on.

It was as good as its word. It took over Emerald's job with an efficiency that was frightening. Emerald didn't even have to speak to anyone anymore, or even appear in public. The pearl ran the entire operation from its little corner of the apartment without fail.

At the start of every cycle, it lifted Emerald gently out of her rest pod, set up her screens to keep her occupied and brought her anything she needed, and at the end of the cycle it put her back in the rest pod. It kept her clean and nourished to the best of its abilities.

Towards the end of her life, Emerald was prone to crying and asking the pearl why it had been so good to her.

"You needed it," was the only answer she ever got.

…..

 _ **Wants**_

She had always wanted a pearl.

Not just any pearl, because she would have been able to afford one from the black market, or a battered second-hand one from the impound auctions. She wanted the latest one, the best one the market had to offer.

The newest ones were smaller, shinier, more efficient and less likely to break down than any that had come before. Ametrine passed the pearl shops on her way to the factory and on her way back, even though that was a walk that added a good half-quadrant to her journey.

She took to standing in front of the shop window looking in when the newest pearls were released and she spotted one she wanted more than she had ever wanted anything. It was pale yellow with threads of gold running through its long straight hair, and its eyes were a blue so dark they were almost black. It was ruinously expensive, even by pearl standards because it was part of a limited edition.

She could make enough to buy it. She had cut back on almost everything to save money. It wasn't impossible.

Except, the next cycle the pearl had been sold. She'd never really had a chance.

Worse still, she saw it a few cycles later, on the luger with its new owner. It would have to be a Larimar, wouldn't it?

If there was a gem type she could say she hated, it would be Larimars. She had never met a single one that wasn't vain, spoiled and stuck-up. They lived off of the hard work of other gems and their own beauty. They were no better than the zoatox really, at least the zoatox had no choice but to be parasites.

This Larimar was particularly bad, because she was well known to be attached to a Kunzite that had won accolades during the zoatox war and a healthy lifelong pension. That pension was now being spent on keeping this Larimar in gaudy apparel, gallium smoke and expensive trinkets (including the limited-edition pearl.)

"Just forget it," her neighbouring Spinel on the assembly line told her, after hearing Ametrine complain about it over and over. "What would you do with a pearl anyway? You could barely fit it in your room."

That was somewhat true...all the assembly workers lived in the factory accommodations in the outer districts, which were just big enough for a rest pod and not much else. The luger brought them in at the start of the cycle and back out at the end, but Ametrine preferred to get up early and walk.

"The new pearls are smaller," she mumbled by way of an answer. "It would fit."

"Just barely," Spinel said. "And the database connection is really weak there anyway, so it would just be like a really nice statue. Seriously, why not just get one second-hand if you want one that badly?"

Ametrine clenched her jaw and refused to speak for the rest of the day.

As luck would have it, the Kunzite who had been partnered with that same Larimar visited the factory to look at their accounts, and as it was just before clocking-off-time, Ametrine was able to follow her home. Strangely enough, Kunzite didn't live in the fancy high-end district but near the docks.

It was almost too perfect. Gems were mugged down at the docks all the time.

She trailed them for twelve cycles, trying to figure out Larimar's routine and when she would be most likely to let her guard down. The chances of her getting away with the pearl were very slim, but it was better than nothing, right? Sure enough, Larimar had a blind spot; she stopped for a smoke of gallium with a friend every two cycles in the same district. She usually left the pearl sitting with another pearl in the quadrangle.

There were holo-recorders mounted around the quadrangle, that's what made gems like Larimar leave their pearls out in the open with no fear that they'd be stolen. But Ametrine had made holo-recorders before in another factory; she knew well how to jam them.

She disguised herself as an off-colour Jade; they were around the same size, and many off-colour Jades were known criminals. After setting up a signal to jam the holo-recorders, it was simply a matter of stabbing the pearl through the stomach to get it to retreat into its gem and pocket it. It all went off without a hitch, nobody even tried to stop her (perhaps just the sheer shock of having something stolen from the quadrangle paralyzed the witnesses.)

The pearl was even prettier up close, when it manifested its form again back at Ametrine's apartment.

"I have been stolen," were the first words the pearl spoke. Ametrine was taken aback.

"Uh, yeah, I guess," she responded. "I was going to buy you anyway, though, and that Larimar would have gotten tired of you after a while, so I kinda did you a favour..."

The pearl blinked. Its stillness was a little unnerving, come to think of it.

"Our processes are usually wiped when we are stolen," it told Ametrine bluntly. "Otherwise there's a chance we can be traced."

"Right, I'll get around to that, thanks," Ametrine spluttered. It was a real novelty to be given tips on how to be a thief from the object you stole.

The novelty wore off fast. Ametrine didn't really know what to expect, but she got the feeling the pearl... _disapproved_ of her, somehow. It never said anything unless it was asked, and it did exactly what it was told to do, but there was always a glimmer of _something_ underneath, something that sent Ametrine's skin crawling.

She had committed a criminal act that usually resulted in a shattering, to feel like a nobody in the presence of a damn _pearl?_

The worst part was when she brought it along to social gatherings and there were other pearls there. (She had to disguise it as a regular edition pearl, which took a lot of the joy out of _limited-edition.)_ The pearls sat on the sidelines and didn't talk, but Ametrine still got the feeling they were communicating somehow. Occasionally they would move, just a hand or even a finger, and then she got the feeling they were _laughing_ at her.

In the end, she dumped it outside the impound centre wrapped in a polychrome sheet, and tried to put the whole sorry mess behind her.


	12. Chapter 12

**A String of Pearls**

 **Chapter Twelve**

Author's note: I'm afraid regular readers of my stuff are going to have to get used to me spamming the link to my novel in all future updates, just knowing it's finally published has kick-started my writing gene into overdrive, so while my schedule is no less hectic than it's always been, I'm writing a lot more and more often.

US link: dp/B07BGSPPBY

UK link: . /dp/B07BGSPPBY

PS: The second part of this is very dark, even by my standards. I would advise proceeding with caution.

…..

 _ **The Memory Keeper**_

All things considered, she was lucky. She was a bargain basement pearl, an old model whose price had been reduced multiple times as the new models had come out. She would have been liquidated if the local impound hadn't needed a new pearl to crunch the numbers for them, but were unwilling to spend much money on it. She was dragged out of storage after seventeen orbits and put to work.

The impound was always busy; with every new pearl release came an influx of the unwanted ones to be recycled, as well as the ones that had been lost and not reclaimed, the counterfeits seized from the black market raids, the ones whose owners had been shattered, and what was left of the ones who wound up in the barracks.

She didn't have much contact with the world outside of the compound, she'd gone straight from shop to work. She was still wearing the plain sheath they all left the clutch in, no gem could be bothered trying to change it.

There was a scrap of regret in her, what little the **nothing** allowed for, that she would probably work the impound right up until she was no longer useful without making a single good memory. She supposed she was grateful, as her owners mostly ignored her and there were pearls that would give anything to be in her position. But still...

 _Will you take my memories for me?_

Pearl gesture-speak was still new to her, but she understood at least that much. The pearl sitting on the process machine was serene, just moments away from being destroyed. She was in near perfect condition.

 _I will, but why give them to me?_

The other pearl's eyes swiveled towards the door, where the Sodalite manning the machine was filling out the paperwork.

 _My owner kept me indoors. I have not met many pearls, and I have not given away my memories. I would like you to keep them, if you will._

Being given a memory was a generous gift on its own. Being gifted a pearl's entire lifetime of memories was just about the highest honour a pearl could bestow on another.

Watching the door, the impound pearl crossed the floor and held the pre-process pearl's hand, stood rigidly still as the memories drained from her.

 _Oh!_

What memories these were! This pearl had lead a life of mostly joy. Her owner had treated her with respect, as a beloved companion. A hundred warm glances, kind words, sweet embraces, she experienced them all in a fraction of a parsec.

The pre-process pearl was happy to go to her death now, knowing she had been so loved. The impound pearl scuttled back to her workstation, Sodalite marched back in and turned on the machine.

In the aftermath, word seemed to spread somehow among the pearls. She was asked to take memories again and again, from pearls in mint condition to badly malfunctioning wrecks. It was so easy, when the process workers barely paid her any mind and she could go about the impound plant as she pleased. She started collecting the memories when the process workers had gone home, when she was supposed to be resting on her charge pad.

She gesture-spoke to them all, though they could have spoken aloud with no gem around to hear them but gesture-speak was much preferred. She asked them for their most treasured memories and these were the ones she held close to the surface of her own gem. Sometimes she projected them from her gem to the impound wall, so they could experience the memory one last time together.

From the impound plant, she lived a thousand lifetimes. She was loved, pampered, shown off and respected. She was loathed, punished, struck and disposed of. She was broken, abused, humiliated and tossed aside. She was admired, maintained, polished and never touched. She took the bitter with the sweet, and though there were a great many more bad memories than good she honoured the lives of the pearls that had lived them.

Many orbits passed, Homeworld endured catastrophe and terror and through it all she collected the memories with all the diligence she possessed. She was getting older, and was probably going to be processed soon herself. She bundled up all the memories she had, even her own scant few of the pearls she had met, to give to a worthy pearl when she came across one.

…..

 **The Remodeler**

Remodeling was one of the most profitable underworld activities a gem could take up, because how difficult it was to get right directly correlated with how much money a gem was willing to spend to have it done.

The penalties ranged from three orbits in isopod to instant shattering.

Naturally, Orthoclase was the only remodeler in her district, because she'd managed never to get caught. She received her clientele's pearls through a half dozen different proxies, and her workshop was designed to be packed up and spirited away at a parsec's notice. Plus, knowing probably more about pearls than just about any other gem, except perhaps the one that invented them in the first place, she was able to hide or disguise every new pearl she was working on as something completely different.

Her own pearl, a modified all-purpose she'd gotten from the black market in the early cycles of her operation, carried the mid-procedure-pearls around in her subspace. Outside of the workshop, they looked like any other random Orthoclase and pearl.

"I got parts to spare," Orthoclase offered on a regular basis. "They're yours if you want them."

"No thank you," the pearl always replied serenely.

Orthoclase sometimes wondered about what was going on in her pearls' mind. She had personally removed the pearl's spike the cycle after getting her, and since then she was careful to treat her with some basic respect. She sat in the corner of the workshop watching Orthoclase operate on her fellow pearls, cycle in cycle out, without so much as a flinch.

And even Orthoclase herself sometimes flinched when she learned what her clients wanted done to their pearls. Limbs permanently removed, extra limbs grafted on, behavior chips added to make the pearl sound extra subservient, sad or afraid.

She never turned down a job, though. The money was too good.

One of her most recent jobs was a particularly tricky one; disguising the pearl as a Larimar. She could do it, certainly, but it was going to take a while. She picked up the pearl at one of her contact points, stowed it in her own pearl's subspace and brought it back to the workshop, grumbling mostly to herself all the while.

"This is going to take up all of my blue pigments," she moaned, as her pearl nodded along. "Let's hope we don't get any cheap recolour jobs any time soon, I hate turning those down..."

"I can order more, if you want," the pearl offered.

"Not right now," Orthoclase warned. "I just made an order five cycles ago, too much and they'll start looking into it. You can look for some other sources though, somewhere far out."

Once back at the workshop, the client pearl was removed from the subspace, reformed and inspected. Orthoclase swore under her breath.

"Damn," she muttered darkly. "I really hate these ones."

The client pearl was badly damaged, probably from multiple below-surface hairline cracks. It was off-coloured and there were chunks missing from its mass. It had been bought for one purpose, and it was one of Orthoclase's least favourite jobs.

"Right, so we have to make this poor scrap look like a Larimar," she told her pearl, who had brought up the schematics and reference pictures. "Sick freaks."

The pearl was clearly destined for the 'destruction' market. Normally those gems were satisfied by watching a pearl get ruined in as many ways as possible, but the novelty factor was increasingly in demand. Since Orthoclase had just cracked the method of making pearls look like other gems, at least temporarily, she'd gotten a lot of these requests.

"At least it'll be over quickly," she muttered, gently adding spare nacre to the gaps in the client pearl's mass. "I hope, anyway."

Included in the client's notes were instructions to alter the voice box, to sound like a Larimar, and to tweak its pain and fear receptors. That required removing the spike, as it rendered both fear and pain as a minor annoyance. Orthoclase's pearl was downloading vocal clips from the mainframe.

She wondered what kind of gem had placed this order. Was it for private use, a gem that had some sort of grudge against Larimars? She thought maybe a Chalcedony, but what Chalcedony in Homeworld could afford these kind of mods?

Perhaps it was a jealous Emerald, or a Kunzite. Perhaps they had been recently spurned, or had a bad break-up. Or maybe it was some nebbish Sodalite in the database centre who had just enough money and just enough spite to carry it out. But these were just theories, and in boring truth it was probably just a Hematite looking to make some fast money out of gems that disliked Larimars.

She ended the cycle with the spike removed, the mass patched and the colour half-done, and resolved to do the behavior mods at the first quadrant.

She was alarmed to find that some mods had already been done when she arrived at the workshop the next cycle. There was only one gem that could have done them.

"What are you playing at?" she hissed, dragging her pearl out of the workshop, away from the modded pearl. "Do you even know what you're doing?"

"Yes," the pearl answered serenely. "I have picked up most of the popular modification techniques."

"That's not what I mean," Orthoclase growled. "I had specific instructions. If the client sees what you've done..."

"They won't," the pearl insisted. "I've buried it under code. The voice modules will do the work, the client will not know there's anything missing."

" _Behavior_ mods," Orthoclase emphasized. "It's not the voice they paid all this money for, they want it to act scared."

"She will."

"How do you know?"

"She will," the pearl insisted, clenching her fists. Despite herself, Orthoclase was startled; she'd never seen a flicker of emotion deeper than a faint smile from her pearl in all these orbits.

"She will cry and beg as she's supposed to," the pearl continued. "No-one will know the pain receptors are blocked. Please don't reverse it."

Orthoclase sighed, ran her hands through her hair. This was a disaster; if it was discovered, it would lose her clients, damage her reputation, maybe even get her caught and shattered if someone decided to report what they knew to Homeworld authority.

On the other hand...

Her pearl had watched for orbits as Orthoclase systematically mutilated her fellow pearls, messed up their programming and sent them back to their owners to be treated as lower than common dirt. She had sent countless pearls to an unpleasant end, and her pearl had never so much as blinked an eye.

 _But...how many times has she done this? Why did I only see it now?_

Even knowing much more about pearls than the average gem, Orthoclase had assumed her pearl would be nothing short of obedient at all times. She had also assumed the pearl had no real thoughts or feelings of her own, despite the evidence.

"Fine," she mumbled at last. "We do the colour and send her out as is. But we should pack up and get ready to run."

The pearl was finished, packed up and sent away. Two cycles later the holovid circled around the private viewing rooms, and nobody noticed anything untoward. They all seemed satisfied that the faux-Larimar was as scared and suffering as she was supposed to be.


End file.
